Agriculture-led growth helps to lower food prices, creates greater prosperity and economic diversification, and is driven by technology and innovation. Wheat transformation has been validated in literature over several years to validate genetic effects and study phenotypic changes. Recent work has improved protocols for transformation, allowing increased scale and speed of development of transgenics.

The commercial release of HB4 wheat by Bioceres in Argentina paves the way for GM wheat to be grown around the world. Genome editing to improve crop production offers numerous benefits - predictability, precision, efficiency, and a more direct and shorter path to improved yield, quality, and resilience in varieties and hybrids.

Yet major challenges remain to fully capitalize fully on the promise including regulation of transgenics, and products from genome editing are a global policy patchwork, while intellectual property issues often mean that lengthy legal negotiations are needed for even simple research agreements. Finally, efficient and accessible plant transformation remains out of reach of many labs. Wheat offers its own unique challenges of having three genomes and is among the most traded of grains around the world which complicates acceptance of biotechnology products.

The workshop will bring together speakers to share their views and experiences on the importance of global agriculture-led growth and recent progress on transformation and genome editing in wheat, with recommendations for future research into application and downstream use.

This workshop will be co-hosted by USAID and the Australian National University who offer complementary global- and Australia-relevant perspectives on wheat transformation and genome editing.

The Center for Agriculture-led Growth at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) focuses investments on research and development in plant and animal productivity. USAID supports current and past initiatives to improve wheat productivity, quality and resilience and is well aligned with international research to help deliver the next-generation of agricultural technologies into the hands of farmers.