A decade-long collaborative study has discovered huge genetic potential that is untapped in modern wheat varieties. The international study which appears in Nature reveals that at least 60% of the genetic diversity found in a historic collection of wheat is unused, providing an unprecedented opportunity to improve modern wheat and sustainably feed a growing global population.
To make this discovery, a cross-institutional collaboration led by Dr. Simon Griffiths, at the John Innes Centre and Professor Shifeng Cheng at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), studied the A.E. Watkins Landrace Collection, a historic collection of local varieties of wheat which are no longer grown anywhere in the world and compared this with modern wheats.
The achievement is the result of a consortium joint effort. Cheng says, "We built a collaborative and complementary consortium with full openness, making resources in germplasm, genomic and phenotypic datasets, publicly available through the Watkins Worldwide Wheat Genomics to Breeding Portal (https://wwwg2b.com/). Our effort has facilitated and accelerated many existing projects both in fundamental research and in breeding practices."
One of the key factors that contributed to the success is the in-depth phenotyping, covering experimental stations from the UK (three locations) and field evaluation (five locations) from northern to southern China. In total, 137 traits were surveyed in this study. This work was particularly underpinned by Rothamsted Research, who worked as a phenotyping hub to add understanding of the qualities and characteristics of the wheat, to connect the crop to the genetic sequence.
The team built a wheat genomic variation map, a haplotype-phenotype association map. The landrace-cultivar comparison revealed that modern wheat varieties only make use of 40% of the genetic diversity found in the Watkins Collection.
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