A climate-ready toolkit for plant breeding

Although credited with a history spanning thousands of years, modern plant breeding began about 300 years ago with the realization that both crossing and selection were required to make genetic progress. Methods of selection are evolving and the recent technology and data boom promises to revolutionize crop breeding. However, the proof of concept for new breeding methods and technologies is still to be fully demonstrated, as is the economic efficiency of their adoption. New challenges, particularly climate change, necessitate an increase in rates of genetic gain that are tied to shifting environmental adaptation.

This talk will discuss advances in breeding methods, and how they can be and are applied for improving selection in wheat. This includes the use of genomic selection, which is on the ascendancy in many important crop species. Beyond genomics, there is also an increasing emphasis on phenomics information and new systems can be used to precisely simulate and test climate change scenarios. In addition, genetic resources remain central to understanding, unpicking and exploiting the inherent complexity of many crops, and an example from wheat will be presented.