Webinar: Finding a name for your new baby wheat gene

Presenter

Scott Boden, Group Leader and ARC Future Fellow, University of Adelaide, Australia

Outline

The sustainability of wheat yields relies on breeding, which strives to maintain and enhance grain production by improving traits such as pathogen resistance, tolerance to abiotic stresses, end-use quality, and yield potential, among others. Breeders achieve these productivity gains by identifying genetic variation for these agronomically important traits, with beneficial alleles being selected, and sometimes fixed, among elite cultivars.

The aim to understand the basis of this genetic variation has encouraged analyses of the wheat genome and the identification of genes that influence these traits, and we anticipate there will be a vast number of new loci discovered and reported in coming years. Based on this anticipated expansion of reported loci, we propose an updated set of guidelines for designating names and symbols of genes for adoption by the wheat community.

In this talk, I will explain the motivation to update the set of guidelines for naming newly discovered genes and introduce the basic principles for selecting a name for your “new baby wheat gene”.

Reference

Boden, S.A., McIntosh, R.A., Uauy, C. et al. Updated guidelines for gene nomenclature in wheat. Theor Appl Genet 136, 72 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-023-04253-w

Recording