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

通过强大的表型和遗传方法，我们对复杂作物性状的理解取得了重大进展，产生了大量与标记、基因或等位基因（基因的替代形式）相关的性状。将这些性状叠加起来，推动作物改良的潜力是巨大的，比如快速增产或持久抗病。利用我们对复杂作物性状的日益了解的关键瓶颈是我们有效地结合这些性状的能力。在作物中引入与特定性状相关的基因或等位基因通常会引入额外的不需要的遗传物质，包括可能对作物性能产生负面影响的等位基因；这个过程称为联动拖动。在优良品种中快速堆叠多个性状，产生新的等位基因组合，同时打破非优势等位基因的连锁阻力，这是一项重大挑战。这主要是由于重组率低，重组往往发生在染色体的远端在我们的许多重要作物。科学家的一个关键目标是增加重组的分布和速度，这将有助于有针对性地引入特定的等位基因，而不需要有害的遗传物质。今年，我们发表了一项研究，通过识别发生在小麦染色体上的大频率基因转换，展示了尚未开发的重组来源。此外，利用现有的数据集，我们能够确定RECQ7基因调节这些事件的大小和/或频率。这项拨款提案旨在以这些最初的发现和开发的技术为基础。我们提出了概念验证，即操作RECQ7提供了增加重组的潜在机制，从而驱动新的等位基因组合。产生这个原型工具是释放这项研究在育种计划中的影响的第一步。

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.