Phenotyping Pipeline for Transgenic Wheat and Barley

Many candidate genes are now available for potentially improving the tolerance of plants to abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity stresses. Transformation methods for wheat and barley are now well advanced and large number of transgenic lines can be generated.  The emphasis of work has shifted to develop high throughput techniques to evaluate the efficacy of transgenes and explore options for optimising transgene expression. The ultimate aim of engineering wheat and barley for tolerance to stresses such as drought and salinity is to enhance yield when the plants are grown under these stresses.  In the ideal case this would involve extensive field trials.  However, in most countries there are strict regulatory requirements covering field release of transgenic lines and there are usually significant constraints for organisations to undertake field trials.  Effective pathways and processes for evaluating lines prior to field trials is becoming increasingly important to ensure that only the most promising lines advance.  Therefore a key question is, how can we develop evaluation methods in controlled and contained environments that accurately reflect performance in the field?  For crops such as wheat and barley the behaviour of single plants will rarely reflect performance in the field where plants must compete with their neighbours for water resources.  This talk will outline methods used to simulate stress in controlled environments and discuss their relevance to field performance.