Shaping Wheat for the Future: Building a leading R&D platform for enhanced wheat varieties

Since about 2010, Bayer CropScience is investing strongly in the development of a wheat seeds & traits business. The goal is to become a global leader in the wheat seeds & traits business, building on a broad germplasm base with local variety development and a value adding trait portfolio with the focus on agronomic performance.

To accelerate the development of  new varieties and value-added traits Bayer CropScience has set up a broad global network of collaborations with leading international institutions and companies.

In 2013 Bayer entered into a strategic collaboration with KeyGene to improve agronomic traits in major agricultural crops. Under this agreement Bayer has access to the KeySeeQ® discovery pipeline and the KeyPoint® high throughput mutagenesis platform. The scope of the first joint research program is wheat. KeyGene will identify mutations in target genes for trait improvement and Bayer will introduce the novel alleles into new wheat varieties for the benefit of wheat farmers worldwide.

Sequence-based mutation discovery in wheat poses significant challenges, mostly related to the large and polyploid nature of the wheat genome. Bayer is building strong wheat genomics and bioinformatic capabilities which we are leveraging in our gene discovery and quest for improved wheat varieties. By joining forces with KeyGene we are able to address the scientific challenges in an efficient and effective way.