Future-proofing our food: exploiting landrace diversity for more efficient andresilient wheat

To ensure global food security, crop breeders must develop varieties which are
more productive as well as more resilient to the potential impacts of climate
change. Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is the most important grain source for
humans, but the intensive breeding of the green revolution, whilst saving billions
of lives, led to a huge bottleneck in genetic diversity. This means that traits such
as heat and drought tolerance, which could become vital breeding targets in the
next few decades, may need to be introduced back into the breeding pool from

additional sources. Global landrace collections, made up of traditional, locally-
adapted varieties, may be a good place to look for wheat lines that can tolerate

heat and drought stress, and if the genetic variants underlying these traits can
also be isolated, then introgression back into elite cultivars will be more efficient.
The recent development of an Associative Transcriptomics platform based on
landrace wheat accessions by the Harper/Bancroft labs, provides an excellent
resource for associating trait variation with gene sequence (SNP) and expression
(GEM) markers. During this project, the student will phenotype the landraces
for their response to heat and drought, before using Associative Transcriptomics
to identify genetic markers associated with them. These markers will be validated
for use in marker-assisted selection, and will be used to propose candidate genes
and reveal the mechanisms underlying these traits.
This project offers the opportunity to apply a new statistical genetics approach
to important breeding targets in bread wheat for the first time, and would suit a
student who is interested in pursuing a project which combines glasshouse,
laboratory and bioinformatics activities.