Provision of TILLING resources and platforms in wheat.

小麦是一种重要的粮食作物，种植在全球超过2亿公顷的土地上，提供了我们消耗的大约20%的卡路里。上个世纪，由于植物育种和化肥和杀虫剂使用量的增加，小麦产量大幅增加，特别是在发展中国家。最近，产量提高速度有所放缓，许多国家的产量可能趋于平稳。人口增长、饮食结构变化、气候变化和使用土地作为生物燃料等一系列因素突出了粮食安全的重要性，并表明需要继续提高小麦产量和作物利用水和化肥等投入的效率。这是在我们对植物的理解迅速进步的时候，这将极大地帮助基于知识的作物育种。所谓的“模式物种”的工作是确定对植物生长和生产力具有重要作用的基因和途径。与此同时，新技术正被应用于生物学问题，导致了关于一般植物，特别是作物的基因构成的信息爆炸式增长。这将确定小麦中可能对作物产量和质量起重要作用的“候选基因”。为了测试这些基因的重要性或操纵它们的活性来改善作物表现，我们需要有能力对小麦的基因功能进行常规修改。虽然这可以通过基因转化实现，但转基因植物在欧洲还没有得到消费者的接受。作为另一种选择，我们可以使用这些候选基因的自然或诱导变异来研究它们的功能。然而，小麦基因组非常复杂(包含160亿个碱基对的DNA)，直到最近，识别特定基因的微小差异还是一项不可能的任务。最近，植物科学家开发了一种名为耕作的方法，使突变发现过程更加可行。这项技术允许研究人员在大量植物中搜索那些携带感兴趣的单个基因突变的植物。然后，可以比较那些被识别的个体，以评估基因在决定植物表现方面的作用，而在作物物种中，那些特性得到改善的个体可以进入育种计划，以产生新的品种。耕作是获取作物物种遗传变异的一种潜在的非常有吸引力的方法，但它有几个局限性。虽然耕作效率很高，但现有的方法相当复杂，需要昂贵的设备。此外，某些作物，如小麦，由于其DNA的内在复杂性，并不适合这项技术。同样重要的是，科学家需要获得小麦耕作品系才能对其进行筛选，但并不是所有现有的资源都可以公开获取或以容易使用的形式获得。在这项提案中，我们将把小麦耕作作为一种公共和开放获取的资源来组织。我们已经收集了合适的含有自然和诱导突变的面包和面食小麦品系，我们将通过为每个品系准备大量DNA和种子来使这些品系随时可用，并免费提供给英国研究人员。我们已经开发出一种低成本的耕作方法，应该能够让所有感兴趣的科学家和植物育种者在小麦上应用这项技术。作为该项目的一部分，我们将提供有关这些方法的实用培训课程，以进一步减少小麦耕作的障碍。我们还致力于建立通过高通量测序识别突变的新方法。我们相信，通过使这项技术更容易为研究人员所用，我们将推进我们对小麦基因功能的理解。这是修改这些基因的第一步，以帮助小麦育种者培育出产量更高、营养特性更好、资源利用效率更高的新品种，造福消费者、农民和环境。

Wheat is a vital food crop, planted on over 200 million hectares of land globally and providing about 20% of the calories that we consume. Yields of wheat increased dramatically in the last century, particularly in the developing world, due to a combination of plant breeding and increased use of fertilisers and pesticides. More recently, yield improvements have slowed and in many countries may be levelling off. A host of factors such as population growth, change in dietary patterns, climate change and use of land for biofuels have highlighted the importance of food security and demonstrate the need for continued improvement in wheat yields and in the efficiency with which crops use inputs such as water and fertilizer. This comes at a time of rapid advances in our understanding of plants that will greatly assist in knowledge-based crop breeding. Work on so-called 'model species' is identifying genes and pathways that are important in plant growth and productivity. At the same time, new technologies are being applied to biological questions, resulting in an explosion of information on the genetic makeup of plants in general, and crops in particular. This will identify 'candidate genes' in wheat that may play significant roles in crop yield and quality. In order to test the importance of these genes or to manipulate their activity to improve crop performance, we need the ability to routinely modify gene function in wheat. While this can be achieved through genetic transformation, transgenic plants have yet to gain consumer acceptance in Europe. As an alternative, we can use natural or induced variation in these candidate genes to investigate their function. However, the wheat genome is very complex (containing sixteen billion base pairs of DNA) and until recently identifying small differences in specific genes was an impossible task. Recently, plant scientists developed a method called TILLING which makes the mutation discovery process more feasible. This technique allows researchers to search within a large collection of plants for those carrying mutations in a single gene of interest. Those individuals identified can then be compared to assess the role of the gene in determining plant performance, and in crop species those with improved properties can be entered into breeding programmes to produce new varieties. TILLING is potentially a very attractive approach to accessing genetic variation in crop species, but it has several limitations. Although TILLING is efficient, the existing methods are quite complex and require expensive equipment. In addition, certain crops such as wheat are not ideally suited for this technique due to inherent complexities in their DNA. Equally important, scientists need access to wheat TILLING lines to be able to screen them, but not all of the existing resources are publicly accessible or in a readily usable form. In this proposal we will organize wheat TILLING as a public and open access resource. We already possess suitable collections of both bread and pasta wheat lines containing natural and induced mutations, and we will make these readily available by preparing large quantities of DNA and seeds for each line, and provide these free to UK researchers. We have developed a low-cost TILLING method that should enable all interested scientists and plant breeders to perform this technique in wheat. As part of this project, we will offer practical training courses on these methods to reduce further the barriers to wheat TILLING. We also aim to establish new methods for identifying mutations by high-throughput sequencing. We are convinced that by making this technology more accessible to researchers we will advance our understanding of gene function in wheat. This is the first step in modifying these genes to help wheat breeders produce new varieties with improved yield, better nutritional properties and better resource use efficiency for the benefit of consumers, farmers and the environment.