It is thought that wheat evolved once or twice circa 8,000 to 10,000 years ago and thus it went through a significant genetic bottleneck. Breeders have been extremely successful in exploiting the genetic variation available to develop high yielding varieties. However, in addition to the exploitation of the genepool of wheat itself, significant step changes in wheat improvement have been attained through the introgression of genetic variation from its wild relatives, e.g. Aegilops umbellulata (Sears, 1955), 1BL.1RS wheat-rye translocation (Foulkes et al., 2007), Aegilops ventricosa (Doussinault et al., 1983), Triticum dicoccoides (UK variety Robigus). Due to the size of the genepool, the wild relatives logically provide a level of genetic variation above and beyond anything present in wheat itself. It is thus not surprising that researchers are now frequently finding previously unknown introgressions in wheat varieties that have been unconsciously selected for by breeders.

In order to exploit the genetic variation available in the wild relatives, we have combined a specific crossing strategy with cutting edge marker technologies to generate and identify large scale introgressions into wheat. At the Nottingham/BBSRC Wheat Research Centre, we have generated many hundreds of genome-wide introgressions for future exploitation in wheat improvement programmes. The levels of recombination we have observed represent a step change in the frequency of wheat/wild relative introgression, e.g. in several species, the level of recombination is sufficiently high that we have been able to develop genetic linkage maps of the wild relatives.

Pilot trait analysis has already revealed the presence of considerable genetic variation for specific traits, and also novel types of genetic variation not present in wheat. All the lines that we are developing are being made freely available to the wheat community and in addition the sequences of many hundreds of new KASP markers designed specifically to detect introgressions.