Exploitation of Interspecific Diversity in Wheat

Due to modern breeding practises relatively little genetic variation is available in modern wheat varieties for breeders to develop superior adapted genotypes with increased yield potential and tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses.

The wild relatives of wheat provide a vast and largely untapped reservoir of genetic variation (for traits such as tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses, biomass, yield and photosynthetic potential).

Our primary objective is to transfer small, alien chromosome segments, carrying target genes but lacking deleterious genes, into hexaploid wheat quickly and efficiently. This is being achieved via exploitation of new marker technology, comparative mapping, exploitation of the genome sequence of model plant species and Next Gen Sequencing technology platforms to detect and characterise wheat/wild relative recombinants.

Our initial results have shown very large numbers of wheat/wild relative introgressions, far beyond what we would have predicted from previous research, i.e. to date over a thousand potential introgressions from six different species. We believe that the strategy we have employed, accompanied with a new Affymetrix wild relative SNP array and genomic in situ hybridization techniques, provide a step change in our ability to transfer genetic variation into wheat from its distant relatives.