Award details

Engineering wheat for take-all resistance

Reference	BBS/E/J/000CA511
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Anne Osbourn
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Christopher Ridout
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	John Innes Centre Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	169,307
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	15/04/2013
End date	31/03/2017
Duration	47 months

Abstract

Take-all disease has a substantial impact on wheat yield throughout the cereal-growing areas of the world and is a major threat to food security. The cost of this fungal disease to wheat production in the UK is estimated at £85-340m per annum. Take-all is a ubiquitous and chronic problem that that imposes serious limitations on wheat production as roughly half of UK wheat crops are affected. Introduction of genes through conventional breeding strategies relies on the identification of resistances through screening, and subsequent crossing into elite varieties, and is the approach taken in the wheat pre-breeding LoLa (BB/J004596/1). Our proposal takes a complementary approach that involves the direct introduction of cloned genes for take-all resistance into wheat through genetic modification (GM) which has the potential for more rapid delivery of useful genes into elite wheat varieties. We have assembled a customised toolkit for triterpene metabolic engineering in plants consisting of characterised genes and enzymes from oat and other plant species. Our aim is to engineer single and multiple steps for triterpene synthesis into hexaploid wheat and evaluate the consequences of this for triterpene production, plant performance and take-all resistance. The development of methods for high-efficiency transformation of wheat with multiple genes within this proposal will lay the foundation for introduction of other valuable multi-gene traits/processes (e.g. nitrogen fixation, C4 photosynthesis, polygenic pest/pathogen resistance, seed micronutrient content) into wheat in the future. The key deliverables and outcomes of this research programme will be: 1. Evaluation of a transgenic approach to engineer wheat for the synthesis of protective triterpenes; 2. Establish a multi-gene wheat transformation platform; 3. Provide industry with a potential solution to take-all disease; 4. Training of project scientists in cross-disciplinary and applied crop research

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Crop Science, Microbiology, Plant Science, Synthetic Biology
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

I accept the terms and conditions of use (opens in new window)

export PDF file

back to list new search