NIAB - National Institute of Agricultural Botany
Plant Science Into Practice
Genetics and Breeding
Contact: Professor Andy Greenland
In Genetics and Breeding we have started major initiatives in developing novel genetic resources that control the time of flowering in wheat and a programme on the re-synthesis of hexaploid bread wheat.
Working closely with members of the Crop Genetics group at the John Innes Centre at Norwich, a range of different Ppd genes have been isolated from diverse sources. In the next phase of this work NIAB wheat breeders are transferring these genes to UK wheat varieties in a backcross programme. Once completed it will be possible to test the effect of each individual Ppd variant on flowering time relative to the original variety. Once this work has been completed each line will be a pre-breeding source of novel flowering time variation for commercial breeders to exploit. Early flowering Ppd genes are likely to become more important as summers become hotter and drier due to climate change.
In a parallel programme of work to introduce novel sources of genetic variation into UK wheat we are using re-synthesized or “synthetic” wheat lines produced by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT in Mexico). These synthetic wheats recreate a hybridization event (see figure, left panel) which occurred some 10,000 years ago by artificially crossing durum wheat with a wild grass Aegilops tauschii (see figure, right panel). Since the original hybridization was a rare if not unique occurrence, from which all our current bread wheats are derived, re-synthesis is a process that has enormous potential to provide genetic variation that is not in the current wheat gene pool. The difficulty is finding the novel genes with traits that are valuable which we are doing by working from a small set of CIMMYT synthetics which we have determined carry most of the new genetic variation. NIAB’s wheat breeders are crossing the CIMMYT lines to UK winter wheat varieties and will screen derived breeding lines for new disease resistance, improved yield and in particular traits, such as tolerance to drought, that will be useful in adaptation to climate change.
Projects
- Pre-breeding at NIAB – Ppd alleles and markers, QTL for earliness per se and novel variation from synthetic wheat useful to UK/EU wheat improvement.
- Unraveling the molecular genetic basis of Striga resistance in cereals: integrating quantitative trait loci (QTL) and genomic approaches.
- Transgenic Initiative