Written by Charlotte Cunningham
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. Charlotte Cunningham reports. 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 around 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 to the tune 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. 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…
The post UKRI funding helps RAGT Seeds fast-track access to key wheat traits appeared first on cpm magazine.
Continue reading on CPM website...
If you are enjoying what you read then why not considering subscribing:
