Increasing genetic diversity in wheat by interfering with mismatch repair

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Mismatch repair (MMR) is the process which all organisms use to repair DNA damage. We intend to generate wheat plants which have reduced levels of MMR and hence elevated levels of genetic diversity and recombination. As a proof of principle we intend to use this material to generate lines carrying novel combinations of HMW-glutenin alleles. Plants having greater allele diversity will be extremely valuable to wheat geneticists and wheat breeders as both a source of new alleles and as a means of recombining chromosomes to generate new variants. The approach builds upon our existing work using a truncated wheat Post Meiotic Segregation Increased 2 (TaPMS2) gene to reduce mismatch repair activity (MMR). In this proposal we intend to develop and characterise a series of transgenic lines carrying single and multiple gene constructs to further reduce MMR activity. We hypothesize that such plants will carry an increased level of allelic diversity, for instance within the glutenin loci, we also hypothesize that reduced MMR activity will lead to plants having a higher level of recombination between non-identical sequences. As such transgenic material might be problematical for today's wheat breeders, we also intend to pursue alternative, but longer term, routes to generate similar material via non-transgenic means.