A pioneering project to help identify and capture key genetic data that can be used by wheat breeders to speed up the development of more resilient varieties has been launched by RAGT Seeds.
The work aims to capture genetic variation in European bread wheat using sequencing technologies and to translate this to enhance marker-assisted selection and genomic selection in RAGT's wheat breeding programmes.
It will involve scanning about 260 commercial wheat varieties carefully selected for their genetic diversity.
The project, headed by RAGT geneticist Dr John Baison with the mentorship of Dr Christopher Burt and Dr Richard Summers, has been awarded a grant from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship of £240,000 over four years.
In recent years plant breeders have increasingly used genetic variants to improve wheat varieties, in particular variants known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are linked to known traits such as disease resistance, environmental adaption, bread-making characteristics and yield components.
Beneficial traits
Breeders can use SNP molecular markers as proxies for tracking these beneficial traits. This enables them to screen many thousands of breeding lines more quickly, more cheaply and in some cases more accurately than is possible with conventional in-field assessments.
Dr Baison says: "The ability to target regions of the genome we have been blind to with existing genotyping platforms will greatly enhance our accuracy in locating genes of interest so we can breed for them using molecular markers."
However, at £500 a time, the cost of covering such a large variety database would have been prohibitive without the grant, he adds.
"Ultimately, the project will help us develop varieties with valuable traits, such as BYDV resistance, as well as yellow rust and septoria resistance. This will enable growers to use less pesticide and to grow wheat more reliably."
