- Sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides L.), a thorny, nitrogen-fixing, deciduous shrub, has been widely cultivated in Europe and Asia because of its nutritional and medicinal properties. In these parts of world, sea buckthorn fruit is widely used in the production of juice, wine and jam. Sea buckthorn fruit have rich bioactive compounds including unsaturated fatty acid, vitamins C, carotenoids and flavonoids. And sea buckthorn flavonoids were widely used to inhabit inflammatory response, prevent cardiovascular diseases and ameliorate airway inflammation. Currently, sea buckthorn is widely cultivated across China, India, Mongolia, Russia, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. In addition, sea buckthorn has excellent resistance for drought, cold, heat and salt, which play important role in preventing wind erosion.
  The sea buckthorn genome (Hippophae rhamnoides L. subsp. Mongolica Rousi cv. Fengning) sequencing project was launched by Research Institute of Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry in 2014. Prof. Jianguo Zhang and his colleagues spend more than five years to sequence, assembly and annotate the high-quality reference genome of sea buckthorn using two most advanced sequencing technologies, including PacBio long-read and Illumina paired-end sequencing. According to the genomic, phylogenetic, transcriptomic and phytochemical data, we identified and functionally validated a key gene involving in the biosynthesis of vitamin C, flavonoids, carotenoids, which associated with sea buckthorn quality. This genome will provide sources for further understanding of the genetic regulation of the key secondary metabolites in sea buckthorn, and thus would promote the germplasm utilization and molecular breeding of sea buckthorn varieties.
  To effectively integrate and share our research results about sea buckthorn with the research community, we built the dynamic, interactive and scalable Hippophae rhamnoides Information Archive (HRIA), which contains the complete cultivated sea buckthorn genome (cultivar Fengning) and widely collected transcriptomes, metabolomes, proteasomes and worldwide germplasm resources to promote the settlement of the major biological questions in sea buckthorn industry. A lot of multifunctional analytic tools (e.g. blast, correlation analysis, expression differential analysis, and etc.) can been used for establishing the internal relationships of genes. These data resources will freely serve for sea buckthorn research community, and play important role in the future genetic engineering, functional genomics and population genetic studies in sea buckthorn.

- If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the sea buckthorn genome and HRIA database, please contact us without hesitation.