Scientists from a genomics organization in south China's Shenzhen City have published the draft genome of Tibetan highland barley in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the organization said on Tuesday.

The achievement will help cultivate better strains of Tibet's staple food and increase yield, according to the BGI Tech Solutions in Shenzhen.

The research assembled 3.89 billion of the estimated total of 4.5 billion base pairs of the chemicals that make up DNA in the barley genome, and included 39,197 protein coding genes, said BGI.

A genome is the full complement of an organism's DNA, complex molecules that direct the formation and function of all living organisms. The size of an organism's genome is measured by the number of bases it contains -- base pairs being the building blocks of DNA.

The wheat genome, for example, has about 17 billion base pairs and soybean about 1.1 billion.

Zhao Shancen of BGI said that the work could help explain adaptation to extreme environmental conditions and increase yields.

Highland barley, known in Tibetan as "ne", has been grown on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for nearly 4,000 years.

It makes up 70 percent of all cereal crops in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, home to the world's leading barley production base and center for barley diversity research.

Editor: Julia Qin