Discovery by U of S-led team `game-changer' for wheat crops

A University of Saskatchewan-led team says it has cracked the genetic code for 15 different kinds of wheat — a development that could “usher in a new era for wheat discovery and breeding,” the project lead said.

The U of S said it collaborated on the 10+ Genome Project with more than 95 scientists from institutes and universities in Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Japan, German, the United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“It's like finding the missing pieces for your favourite puzzle that you have been working on for decades,” U of S Crop Development Centre director Curtis Pozniak, the project lead, said in a statement.

Two years ago, a U of S team helped decode the genome for the bread wheat variety, a major milestone at the time. Pozniak said the latest effort, which was published in the science journal Nature, is yet another step toward understanding one of the world's most consumed crops.

“Now we have increased the number of wheat genome sequences more than 10-fold, enabling us to identify genetic differences between wheat lines that are important for breeding,” he said.

Understanding a wheat variety's genetic sequence means researchers and breeders can modify it by identifying beneficial genes to improve harvests and make crops more resilient to fungus, pests and disease. Genetic assemblies were constructed by Israeli company Nrgene, which has an office in Saskatoon.

Pozniak said one gene identified by researchers would help crops resist the orange blossom midge, a pest responsible for more than $60 million in crop damage every year in North America.

The discovery is part of a larger effort by international researchers to sequence thousands of wheat genomes in years to come.

“Understanding a causal gene like this is a game-changer for breeding because you can select for pest resistance more efficiently by using a simple DNA test than by manual field testing,” Pozniak said.