A decade-long international study has unveiled significant untapped genetic potential in modern wheat varieties.
Researchers found that over 60% of the genetic diversity present in a historic wheat collection remains unused, offering a remarkable opportunity to enhance modern wheat strains and help sustainably feed the growing global population.
A century ago, plant scientist Arthur Watkins embarked on an extraordinary project, collecting wheat samples from around the world. He tirelessly persuaded consuls and business agents throughout the British Empire and beyond to send him grain from local markets.
A collaboration between UK and Chinese scientists has sequenced the DNA of all 827 wheat varieties collected by Watkins, which have been preserved for nearly a century.
This sequencing effort has created a genetic goldmine by identifying previously unknown genes. These genes are now being used to develop resilient wheat varieties with higher yields, contributing to efforts to feed Earth’s burgeoning population.
The Watkins collection
The A.E. Watkins collection of bread wheat, assembled during the 1920s and 1930s from 32 countries, stands as the most comprehensive historic wheat collection globally.
This collection captures the diversity of cultivated wheat before modern, systematic plant breeding began, illustrating how genetic variation is dispersed in clusters or ancestral groups worldwide.
Dr. Simon Griffiths, group leader at the John Innes Centre and co-author of the related study, highlighted the collection’s untapped potential: “This missing 60% discovered in this study is full of beneficial genes that we need to feed people sustainably. Over the last ten thousand years we’ve tended to select for traits which increase yield and improve disease resistance.”
“This is going to make an enormous difference to our ability to feed the world as it gets hotter and agriculture comes under increasing climatic strain,” added Dr. Griffiths.
Genotyping wheat
“Wheat has been a cornerstone of human civilisation,” said Griffiths. “In regions such as Europe, north Africa, large parts of Asia, and subsequently North America, its cultivation fed great empires, from ancient Egypt’s to the growth of modern Britain.”
Scientists aimed to pinpoint and study the wheat genes in the Watkins collection following the advent of large-scale DNA sequencing over a decade ago but encountered a unique challenge: the wheat genome is enormous, consisting of 17 billion DNA units compared to the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome.
To overcome this, Griffiths and his team sent samples from the Watkins collection to Professor Shifeng Cheng at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Three months later, they received a suitcase filled with hard drives containing a petabyte (one million gigabytes) of decoded data.
The genome data analysis performed by the Chinese team revealed the origins of modern wheat. The findings showed that global wheat varieties primarily stem from central and western Europe. Remarkably, only two of the seven ancestral groups from the Watkins collection have been utilized in modern plant breeding.
Improving modern wheat
Researchers have identified key traits in the untapped genetic diversity of the Watkins collection, such as nitrogen use efficiency, slug resistance, and resilience to pests and diseases.
Reducing fertilizer use in agriculture, which is costly and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions , is essential for moving towards net-zero agriculture. Improving nitrogen use efficiency in crops and decreasing agriculture’s nitrogen footprint is a global challenge.
Thanks to this study, these valuable traits have been incorporated into modern wheat for the first time in a century, and the resulting data and tools are already being used to enhance crops.
This research connects genetic information to plant characteristics and practical breeding, laying the groundwork for developing new wheat varieties using whole-genome analysis.
The study has been published in Nature .
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