Researchers in China have built the most complete genetic map of cultivated peanut yet and used it to find a previously hidden gene that roughly halves plant height while raising yield by about 20% under dense planting, Global Agriculture reported. The study, published in Nature Genetics on 15 September 2026, could speed the breeding of peanut varieties suited to mechanical harvesting and to smallholder plots alike.

The work was led by Shubo Wan of the Institute of Crop Germplasm Resources at the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, with Rajeev Varshney, director of the Centre for Crop and Food Innovation at Murdoch University in Australia, and colleagues from ICRISAT, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and several provincial academies, under the title "Pan-genome-based resequencing of 2,320 accessions reveals structural variations and accelerates breeding advances in cultivated peanut".

Instead of a single reference genome, the team assembled a pan-genome from 14 high-quality peanut genomes covering all six botanical varieties of Arachis hypogaea, ten of them newly sequenced. They then resequenced 2,320 accessions from 87 countries and regions, most of the core germplasm held by ICRISAT and the US Department of Agriculture, and catalogued structural variations such as insertions, deletions and rearrangements that a single reference would miss.

Among plant-architecture traits, the pan-genome exposed a chromosomal segment carrying a gene, undetected in earlier studies, that reduces plant height and internode length to give a compact, dwarf plant. The team used it to develop LuAi-1, a line about 50% shorter than its parent that yields around 20% more when sown at higher density, because compact plants can be spaced closer without excessive shading or lodging. Varshney said the work shows yield can be raised substantially alongside height reduction, not merely traded against it.

The dataset also flagged variants linked to flowering time, useful for adapting varieties to different seasons and latitudes, and the assemblies, variant data and analysis code have been deposited in NCBI, China's National Genomics Data Center and GitHub for other breeding programmes to use. Plant architecture is a practical bottleneck in peanut production: tall, sprawling plants are hard to harvest mechanically and compete with each other when sown densely, so a validated dwarf gene that breeders can select for directly shortens the path to varieties suited to combines on large farms and to tight planting on small ones, while the pan-genome's wild and landrace diversity offers targets for disease resistance and drought tolerance in future.

Source: Global Agriculture