Award details

Wheat and barley Legacy for Breeding Improvement

Reference	BBS/E/T/000GP020
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Sarah Dyer
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	Earlham Institute
Department	Earlham Institute Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	124,780
Status	Current
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/01/2014
End date	31/12/2018
Duration	59 months

Abstract

To satisfy the demand of an expanding population, agriculture faces the challenge of delivering safer, high-quality, and health-promoting food and feed in an economic, environmentally sensitive, and sustainable manner. While partially achievable by entering marginal lands into agricultural production, a sustained effort is required to generate crops with higher and more stable yields across diverse and changing environments. Wheat and barley are key renewable resources and among the most important crops worldwide. The wild relatives and old cultivars or populations of wheat and barley represent a reservoir of untapped and potentially important genes for crop improvement that have been left behind during the processes of domestication, cultivation, range extension and breeding. WHEALBI will develop and implement tools, methods and procedures to facilitate the characterisation of wild relatives and local varieties of wheat and barley as sources of genes for use in crop improvement. It will explore the application of modern molecular, computational and analytical tools to provide understanding of the evolutionary processes that have shaped the current diversity in the genepool and to predict exploitable value from unadapted germplasm. It will develop innovative methods to optimise the use of these resources in pre-breeding and breeding programmes. Within the work package dedicated to identifying the nature and extent of gene sequence diversity in the wheat and barley genepool, TGAC will sequence exomes of >500 diverse wheat accessions. Robust pipelines for identifying and calling true sequence variations will be established. Variants identified will be used downstream for genome wide analyses focussed on functional and adaptive variation and partitioning between different genepools; allele and pathway mining for adaptive traits and grain quality; and in genome-assisted pre-breeding and breeding methods.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Crop Science, Plant Science
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