Scotland's Rural College (SRUC), Kings Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JG, UK.
The James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, DD2 5DA, UK.
Commun Biol. 2021 Mar 8;4(1):302. doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-01840-9.
Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) is an intellectual property system introduced in 1961 by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) for safeguarding the investment and rewarding innovation in developing new plant varieties. Despite the rapid advancement in our understanding of crop biology over the past 60 years, the DUS system has changed little and is still largely dependent upon a set of morphological traits for testing candidate varieties. As the demand for more plant varieties increases, the barriers to registration of new varieties become more acute and thus require urgent review to the system. To highlight the challenges and remedies in the current system, we evaluated a comprehensive panel of 805 UK barley varieties that span the entire history of DUS testing. Our findings reveal the system deficiencies such as inconsistencies in DUS traits across environments, limitations in DUS trait combinatorial space, and inadequacies in currently available DUS markers. We advocate the concept of genomic DUS and provide evidence for a shift towards a robust genomics-enabled registration system for new crop varieties.
品种特异性、一致性和稳定性（DUS）是国际植物新品种保护联盟（UPOV）于 1961 年引入的知识产权体系，旨在保护开发新植物品种的投资和奖励创新。尽管在过去的 60 年里，我们对作物生物学的理解有了飞速的进步，但 DUS 体系几乎没有改变，仍然主要依赖于一套形态特征来测试候选品种。随着对更多植物品种需求的增加，新品种注册的障碍变得更加尖锐，因此需要对该体系进行紧急审查。为了突出当前体系中的挑战和补救措施，我们评估了一个由 805 个英国大麦品种组成的综合面板，这些品种涵盖了 DUS 测试的整个历史。我们的研究结果揭示了该体系的缺陷，例如不同环境下 DUS 特征的不一致性、DUS 特征组合空间的局限性以及当前可用 DUS 标记的不足。我们提倡基因组 DUS 的概念，并提供证据支持转向新作物品种的稳健基因组学注册系统。
