Developing Next Generation Genetic Tools for Wheat

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Food security is set to be one of the major challenges of the 21st century. By 2050, it is predicted that world food production will have to increased by 50%. This is against the pressures of global climate change and resource limitations. Meeting this challenge is going to require the development of innovative strategies which make use of our unprecedented knowledge of biology. Developing new, low input, high yielding varieties of wheat, will be fundamental to meeting these 2050 goals. The current world wheat harvest is approximately 650 million MT a year, making up a quarter of the world cereal harvest. Bread wheat is a hexaploid with a complex genome, five times the size of the human genome. At the University of Liverpool we are currently engaged in a project to decode the wheat genome using new 'next generation sequencing technology'. A sequenced genome for wheat, together with the development of new genetic tools exploiting this sequence data, will be key to meeting the increased food productivity goal. The aim of this proposal is a programme of retraining for me, built around developing the bioinformatics for two novel genetic analysis tools. The projects will make immediate use of the sequence data being generated at Liverpool. The first part of the project aims to develop a methodology to capture the gene-rich region of wheat. Using this capture technology, together with 'next generation sequencing technology' I will identify the region of the genome deleted in a dwarf line of wheat, rht12, and by identifying overlapping deletions the missing gene responsible for the dwarfing phenotype. Identifying the gene will allow us to understand the dwarfing mechanism in this variety. Dwarfism is a valuable economic trait and lay at the heart of the green revolution allowing increased nitrogen input without plants falling over. This deletion mapping strategy could be used to map other economical valuable deletion mutants. Wheat is made up of three genomes and the second part of the project is to develop a strategy to understand how these three genomes differentially respond to temperature. I will use 'next generation sequencing technology' adapting a technique call RNA-seq. Understanding how wheat responds to temperature at the molecular level will be important for mitigating the affect of global temperature increase on yield. Again , this new tool will be of considerable use to wheat researchers and other researchers working with crops with complex genomes. The proposal is in collaboration with researchers at Advance Genome Facility at the University of Liverpool and wheat geneticists at the John Innes Centre.