An international study has revealed that at least 60% of the genetic diversity found in an historic collection of wheat varieties is unused.
In turn, this is providing an unprecedented opportunity to improve modern wheat production systems.
The scientists involved in the work were given the opportunity of assessing the A.E. Watkins’ Landrace Collection, held at the John Innes Centre in East Anglia.
It constitutes an historic grouping of wheat varieties which are no longer grown anywhere in the world.
Prof. Malcolm Hawkesford, from Rothamsted Research, was one of the scientists involved in the study.
“The genetic diversity of the Watkins’ material represents a fantastic resource for our research in wheat improvement, targeting sustainability and food security.
“We contributed expertise in advanced high throughput field and grain phenotyping to characterise Watkins lines and derived germplasm using multi-year large scale field trials, which was then aligned with the genomic data,” the professor said.
Wheat varieties
The A.E. Watkins’ collection of bread wheat varieties was assembled in the 1920s and 1930s from 32 countries – it represents the most comprehensive grouping of historic wheat varieties anywhere in the world.
The collection provides a snapshot of the diversity of cultivated wheat before the advent of modern, systematic plant breeding and shows how the genetic variation is dispersed in clusters, or ancestral groups, around the world.
Genomics and bioinformatics analysis completed as part of the recent study has allowed scientists to see where modern wheat came from.
Significantly, they discovered that globally, wheat varieties originate from central and western Europe, with just two of the seven ancestral groups in the Watkins collection being used in modern plant breeding.
Key traits already found in this untapped diversity include nitrogen (N) use efficiency, slug resistance and resilience to pests and diseases.
The research team specifically developed a core set of 119ac (plant populations), which represent the breadth of the genetic variation within the Watkins’ collection.
This diversity set was then crossed and back crossed them into modern wheat to make a collection of 12,000 lines of wheat that are now stored in the Germplasm Resource Unit at the John Innes Centre.
This means that for the first time in 100 years, these lost traits have been incorporated into modern wheat, and the data and tools are already being used to improve crops.
In collaboration with UK commercial plant breeders, the study team have created the freely available breeder’s toolkit. This is a set of online resources which are open source and accessible globally for anyone to use.