Wheat has been extremely successful at adaptation to different environments and is grown throughout the world, occupying more territory than any other crop. Understanding the diversity of cultivated wheat that allowed it to rapidly adapt to diverse environment is key for the future of wheat improvement. Traditionally, breeders select for traits observed on the whole plant level.
Using modern sequencing techniques and bioinformatics applications to link subcellular regulation of plant development with trait expression will accelerate breeding programmes. Furthermore, linking methods of recording physical characteristics of a plant in a rapid and precise fashion using new technology (“phenotyping”) with our genomics landscape of a range of commercially important wheat varieties (“genotyping”) will be vital to feed into advances to supply the global population with food.
We will work with other large-scale data generation projects for wheat, such as those proposed in the Global Challenges ODA. This will involve the coordination of delivery of integrated datasets within proposed timescales, through effectively managed analysis and dissemination. Given the complexity of the wheat genome, new and improved analytical tools are needed to enable researchers and breeders to integrate and interrogate data for the functional analysis of diversity within the Triticeae lineage.
Key objectives for this topic include the generation of genomic resources, information about gene regulation, development of computational biology tools, and the assessment of plant physiology through molecular and in-field phenotyping.