Inheritance of gene expression in polyploid wheat

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Ensuring that we have a secure food supply is one of the biggest challenges facing humankind today. To be able to meet this challenge we will need to use a wide range of approaches to improve crop production. Many of our major crops are polyploid, which means that all their DNA has been duplicated and they have multiple copies of each gene. Polyploidy is particularly common in plants and many of our most important foods come from polyploids. It is likely that you ate a polyploid for breakfast since these include the wheat which made your toast, oats in your porridge, potatoes in your hash browns or that healthy banana. The world's population is increasing rapidly, which means we will need to dramatically increase food production to make sure everyone has enough to eat. However, increasing the production of polyploid crops is complicated by the multiple copies of each gene in their DNA. In a non-polyploid plant we can work out the function of an individual gene, to be able to use that gene to improve the crop. For example we might want to identify a gene which can make more tomatoes per plant. However in a polyploid we don't just need to understand what the function of one gene is, we need to know what the other copies are doing too.In our lab we are using wheat as an example to start understanding the multiple copies of genes in polyploids. The different organs and cells in a wheat plant all have the same DNA with three copies of each gene, but the gene copies can be switched on, switched off or dimmed independently, much like a room with three separate lamps. We recently found that about one third of the time the gene copies are turned on at different levels. Surprisingly in different wheat plants these gene copies can be turned on in different patterns. For example in one wheat plant copy number 1 might be turned on, but in a different wheat plant copy number 1 is turned off and copy number 2 is turned on. To develop improved wheat plants we crossbreed different wheat plants to generate seeds that have some characteristics from the mother and some from the father, aiming for improved characteristics overall. We found that the offspring from such a cross may keep the same pattern of gene copies turned on as their mother or their father, or they may make a new pattern. In this project we will discover how often new patterns of gene activity are generated and how these patterns are controlled. The knowledge we obtain will be used to find ways to change the patterns of gene activity which will benefit the production of wheat and other polyploid crops.