Webinar: Enhancing Crop Resilience: Genomic Insights and Novel Sources of Disease Resistance in Winter Wheat

Presenter

Sandip Kale, Assistant Professor, Crop Genetics and Biotechnology, Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, Denmark

Outline

Development of climate resilient, high yielding crop varieties is today's need to ensure food security of future generations amid changing climatic conditions. It means that novel sources of alleles need to be identified/created to increase the genetic variation needed for crop improvement.

Although plant genetic resources (PGRs) such as cultivars, landraces, and crop wild relatives stored in gene banks represent invaluable reservoirs of natural variations, their full potential remains untapped due to a lack of comprehensive genetic and genomic information, which constrains their application in breeding programs. Wheat, fulfilling 20% of the world's calorie and protein requirements and sustaining the livelihoods of 33% of the global population, is particularly susceptible to various diseases.

We conducted extensive genotypic and phenotypic characterization of more than 9000 winter wheat accessions sourced from one of the largest gene banks in the European Union. The genotypic data helped us to correct the errors in the passport data, understand diversity within the collection and trace the origin on introgressions from wild relatives. 

Further, genome-wide association analysis using trait customized core collection (TCCC), developed in the current study, identified novel sources of resistance for yellow and leaf rust diseases in wheat. Finally, we proposed a hybrid strategy to assess the agronomic performance of PGRs for accelerating their use in crop improvement programs.  

References

• Schulthess, et al. (2022). Genomics-informed prebreeding unlocks the diversity in genebanks for wheat improvement. Nat Genet 54, 1544–1552. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01189-7 
• Kale, et al. (2022). A catalogue of resistance gene homologs and a chromosome-scale reference sequence support resistance gene mapping in winter wheat. Plant biotechnology journal, 20(9), 1730–1742. https://doi.org/10.1111/pbi.13843 

Recording