STRATEGY A featured segment designed to share business- critical information to seed-selling professionals. Visit SeedWorld.com to download this department and other tools. Ushering in a New Era of Wheat Genetics Sequencing the wheat genome is like giving plant breeders and researchers Google Maps for crop improvement. Joe Funk jfunk@issuesink.com RESEARCHERS HAVE BEEN breeding new varieties of wheat using conventional cross-breeding approaches for a long time, but the process is expensive, time-consuming and unpre- dictable because it’s impos- sible to guarantee offspring will inherit just the right mix of genes from their parents. But this narrative is changing. In August, after working 14 years on a project to crack bread wheat’s genome, researchers from 19 countries, published their findings in the journal Science. This is wheat’s first fully-annotated reference genome. Using information provided by the completed reference genome sequence, breeders now have tools to identify the genes and elements that regulate complex underlying agronomic traits such as yield, grain quality, resistance to fungal diseases and tolerance to abiotic stresses. Eventually this information will allow plant breeders to produce hardier wheat varieties to help feed the world’s growing population. The impact of the wheat reference sequence has already been significant in the scientific community. On the same day the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) pre- sented the genome sequence to the public, six additional publications described how the reference sequence resource was being used by scientists with advance access to the genomic information. “A big part of sequencing is actually being able to put all of the sequence information back together,” explains Curtis Pozniak, a wheat breeder and professor at the University of Saskatchewan, as well as a member of the IWGSC. “Think about it like a puzzle. “What we do is actually shatter the genome into these teeny tiny pieces and do the sequencing. Then we have to put that back together in the right order along all 21 chromosomes of the wheat genome.” In many ways, Pozniak says that mapping the wheat genome is a bit like climbing a mountain and peering into the valley below. The opportuni- ties are in the valley, but you have to climb the mountain first or the valley will remain hidden, he says. Wheat geneticists with early access to the published information say the newly finished genome has trans- formed their research. Early Impacts The new genome has helped plant geneticists from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, boost grain size by 20 percent in lab-grown wheat. They report identifying multiple copies of a gene for grain size originally found in rice. Using CRISPR, they bulked up wheat grains by mutating the genes. Many more traits beckon. The new sequence “ushers in a new era in wheat genetics,” says James Anderson, a plant breeder at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul. Researchers might also be able to more easily temper the dark side of wheat. Many people are allergic to glutens and other wheat proteins, leading to disorders including celiac disease, baker’s asthma, and non-celiac wheat sensitiv- ity. Scientists have managed to identify many of the spe- cific proteins responsible. “Until now, we couldn’t determine the genes that encoded those proteins,” says Odd-Arne Olsen from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. “With the 36 / SEEDWORLD.COM FEBRUARY 2019 Rudi Appels is an AgriBio Research Fellow and a professor at the University of Melbourne and Murdoch University.