Understanding and modifying meiotic recombination in wheat - BBSRC Southwest Biosciences DTP

Plant breeders rely on the generation and selection of novel allele combinations to generate new genotypes possessing favourable traits. Meiotic recombination plays an essential role in generating these new combinations of alleles. If plant breeders were able to modify either the frequency or the positions where recombination occurred they would be able to both improve the efficiency of the breeding process and generate new and novel combinations of alleles not previously seen. The wheat genomics group at Bristol is at the cutting edge of developing tools which improve the breeding process, for instance in the development wheat Axiom arrays for high throughput precision breeding. Recently the group has developed CRISPr/Cas9 edited plants which are incapable of generating their own recombination events and are therefore sterile. In this project we intend to use these lines to study the recombination process and to search for novel chemical and molecular procedures which generate novel double strand breaks and hence which result in novel patterns of recombination.