A proof of concept that RECQ 7 can be used as a tool to increase recombination

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Significant advances are being made in our understanding of complex crop traits through powerful phenotyping and genetic approaches, resulting in large numbers of traits associated with markers, genes or alleles (alternate forms of a gene). The potential of stacking these traits to drive improvements in crops, such as rapid yield increases or durable disease resistance, are enormous. The critical bottleneck in taking advantage of our increased understanding of complex crop traits is our ability to combine these traits effectively. Introducing a gene or allele associated with a specific trait into a crop often introduces additional unwanted genetic material, including alleles which can negatively affect the performance of the crop; a process called linkage drag. Our ability to rapidly stack multiple traits in elite cultivars, generating new combinations of alleles whilst breaking down the linkage drag of non-advantageous alleles is a major challenge. This is primarily due to low rates of recombination and that recombination tends to occur in the distal ends of chromosomes in many of our important crops. A key goal for scientists is to increase both the distribution and rate of recombination which will aid the targeted introduction of specific alleles, without unwanted deleterious genetic material. This year we published a study demonstrating an untapped source of recombination by identifying large, high frequency gene conversions that occur across the wheat chromosomes. Moreover, using existing datasets we were able to identify that the RECQ7 gene regulates either or both the size and/or frequency of these events. This grant proposal aims to build on these initial discoveries and the techniques developed. We propose to demonstrate the proof-of-concept that manipulation of RECQ7 offers a potential mechanism of increasing recombination thus driving novel allelic combinations. Generating this prototype tool is the first step to releasing the impact of this research in breeding programmes.