Exploiting silenced genes to improve wheat breeding

Secondary Supervisor(s): Dr Estrella Luna Diez

University of Registration: University of Birmingham

BBSRC Research Themes: Sustainable Agriculture and Food (Plant and Crop Science)

Project Outline

Wheat is the most extensively cultivated crop worldwide and it is used as a critical food resource for more than 2.5 billion people. To accommodate the food request of a growing population, it has been estimated that wheat production should increase by 60% by 2050. Recently, changes in DNA molecular modifications (also known as epigenetic marks) generated in model plants produced novel stable phenotypes without altering the DNA sequence itself. This epigenetic variation represents a promising resource to generate more productive crop varieties, in alternative to classical breeding or transgenic plants. However, compared to model plants, wheat has a larger genome and a more complex epigenetic regulation, which requires biological material and tools specifically designed to study epigenetic regulation in this crop.

Although wheat is a target of intense breeding programs, most of these strategies are based on the existing natural genetic variation. With this project, we aim to develop a tool to directly screen for conditions able to increase epigenetic variability in wheat, which is still largely unexplored in crops. Specifically, we will build a transgenic line able to report epigenetic alterations. In such a line, the expression of the reporter gene will be used to efficiently detect conditions where the transcriptional silencing is impaired, facilitating the generation of novel stable epigenetic phenotypes. This approach was initially established in Arabidopsis and used in other plants, significantly contributing to the discovery of new epigenetic factors and the characterization of epigenetic alleles. With the reproduction of such system, we will use such novelbiological tool in wheat to investigate epigenetic alterations of and their effect on the phenotype directly in one of the most important crop important for human food production. Epigenetic variability can potentially add a completely new level of phenotypic variation to assist traditional breeding, contributing to improving wheat and increasing food production and sustainable agriculture, to meet the challenges related to feed a growing population and to adapt agriculture to global climate changes.