China is one of the largest wheat producers in the world with a production forecast (MY15/16) of nearly 125 million tons from 10 major agricultural zones. To sustain this kind of production and future growth requirements, development of higher yielding crops genetics is important. When embarking on breeding programs it is important to understand your current and potential genetic material. Information for selection, mapping and QTL markers are rapidly being developed. Surveying plants for useful markers to build-upon can be a labourious endeavour. Here we show an example project using the Intelliqube, a fully automated genotyping and quantitaive PCR work-station, by screening 100 wheat varieties for 30 QTL markers. The wheat varieties span 20 years of breeding and includes multiple variations of parent lines where traits have been introgressed over time. We screened for QTLs relating to yield, quality, abiotic stress and disease resistance including markers for stem, leaf rust and those associated with UG99. We compared introgression patterns over the last 20 years, showing a slight decreases in some older QTL markers. Newer markers such as Dreb1 have shown a marked increases over the same period. We show the progression of traits for 10 varieties favoured in wheat production in China. Screening was completed within a day in a single 2.25 hour machine run producing 4000 datapoints, a total of 6 hours including thermal cycling and data analysis. The Intelliqube was used here to generate useful data within a very short time period requiring only 30 minutes of operator time.
