A COMMUNITY RESOURCE IN WHEAT TRANSFORMATION

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Most analysts looking at global food security estimate that food production needs to double to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050. Wheat is by far the most important crop in the UK and north western Europe. In the UK average wheat yield is 8-10 tonnes per hectare; doubling the latter over the next 40 years requires that the current annual increases made by breeders, around 74 kg/ha, have to improve 2.5- to 3-fold. Meanwhile our climate is changing and we need wheat varieties which are better adapted to drought and reduced fertilizer inputs to maintain a sustainable supply of affordable, nutritious and safe food. Many technologies will contribute to tackling these targets and it is inevitable that genetic modification (GM) will make a contribution. This will either be directly, with the development and introduction of GM wheat varieties with new traits, or indirectly, as a research tool to better understand how trait genes function.A genetically modified organism (GMO) has a new gene or set of genes added to its genetic material. In the case of plants, these can be introduced by a naturally occurring soil bacterium, Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The bacterium inserts a small piece of DNA containing the new gene into the plant cell, and from the single transformed cell, a normal fertile plant can be regenerated. This process occurs in the natural environment in a limited range of plants, with specific bacterial genes being inserted into the plant cell that cause disease. Over the last 30 years, significant advancements have been made to this technology, removing the bacterial genes which are inserted into the plant cell, and extending the range of plant species to many crops. However wheat has remained quite difficult and inefficient to transform, until recent advances were made by researchers at a company in Japan.NIAB has a Crop Transformation Team which mainly focuses on GM wheat, and is now using these new techniques with great success. We can add one (or a few) new genes into a wheat cell, which already contains an estimated 150,000 genes, and regenerate a new "fine-tuned" wheat plant. This is an important tool, which helps us understand what effect the gene has on the plant, and is much more precise than traditional breeding techniques. It allows both functional analysis of genes for research, and importantly a viable route to breeding new traits for commercial exploitation.GM crops have to date have largely been confined to traits giving resistance to herbicides or insects, but a new generation of traits which confer drought tolerance, disease resistance, yield improvements or health benefits are now being examined which will have an important role to play in achieving food security and future increases in production. Some of these genes come from other crop species and would be impossible to study in wheat without GM. The Community Resource in Wheat Transformation will make it easier and more cost effective for UK academic researchers to access the best wheat transformation system in the world. It will particularly encourage plant scientists working in other species to evaluate their genes in wheat, and provide valuable materials for further research. The funding will also allow the technology to advance so that large or multiple gene combinations can be efficiently and economically transferred to a range of wheat varieties for evaluation.