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Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has been widely used as a model crop for studying molecular
and physiological processes such as chloroplast development and photosynthesis. During the
second half of the 20th century, mutants such as albostrians led to the discovery of the
nuclear-encoded, plastid-localized RNA polymerase and the retrograde (chloroplast-to-nucleus)
signalling communication pathway, while chlorina-f2 and xantha mutants helped to shed light on
the chlorophyll biosynthetic pathway, on the light-harvesting proteins and on the organization of
the photosynthetic apparatus. However, during the last 30 years, a large fraction of chloroplast
research has switched to the more “user-friendly” model species Arabidopsis thaliana, the first
plant species whose genome was sequenced and published at the end of 2000. Despite its many
advantages, Arabidopsis has some important limitations compared to barley, including the lack
of a real canopy and the absence of the proplastid-to-chloroplast developmental gradient across
the leaf blade. These features, together with the availability of large collections of natural genetic
diversity and mutant populations for barley, a complete genome assembly and protocols for genetic
transformation and gene editing, have relaunched barley as an ideal model species for chloroplast
research. In this review, we provide an update on the genomics tools now available for barley, and
review the biotechnological strategies reported to increase photosynthesis eciency in model species,
which deserve to be validated in barley.