description
- Rust is one of the most devastating diseases of wheat, causing severe yield losses in the UK and globally. Wheat, similar to all plants, has a sophisticated immune system that is currently under-deployed in agriculture. The aim of this project is to improve cultivated wheat by isolating novel sources of rust disease resistance and making them rapidly available to wheat breeding programs. Wheat is the most prevailing plant on earth as wheat crops occupy nearly 25% of world agricultural land. With annual production at more than 650 million tons globally, wheat provides a quarter of all calories and fifth of protein supply to humanity, and yet the annual yield increases are critically below the rate required to feed the growing human population. According to the predictions from the World Bank, agricultural productivity will need to increase as much as 70% to feed 9 billion people by 2050. Growing wheat varieties resistant to diseases is an economical and environmentally friendly solution to increase yield on available agricultural land while reducing growth costs. As a New Investigator, I am establishing a research programme focused on improving resistance of wheat to a broad range of fungal diseases. I am leveraging recent technological advances, such as cutting-age sequence technologies, for the efficient study of highly complex wheat genome. I plan to rapidly identify novel rust resistance genes derived from cultivated wheat and make these genes accessible to traditional non-transgenic breeding programmes. I have already carried out a screen for new yellow rust resistant mutants of wheat that I believe are novel and can be a new source of disease resistance. By testing resistance in our wheat lines against a variety of wheat pathogens, including mildews and Septoria leaf spot, my group will identify sources of broad-spectrum resistance. By applying new sequencing technologies in a highly efficient manner we will dramatically reduce the time of wheat gene isolation from 15-20 years to just 2-3 years. Furthermore, I am aiming to investigate the mechanisms of plant resistance and to study the evolution of these mechanisms and their diversity in wheat. Isolation of novel rust resistance genes that are derived from cultivated wheat will make these economically important traits immediately available for ongoing wheat breading programs. As our sources of resistance are derived from elite cultivars, such introduction can be achieved with conventional non-transgenic manner. Knowing the genomic locations of new disease resistance is key to accelerate this process. The gene isolation approach developed here will be applicable to any trait of interest. The major output of my proposed project will be new disease resistance genes and the new tools that plant breeders can use to introduce resistance into the most commonly grown, high yielding wheat varieties. I foresee a great benefit from this project not only to wheat breeders and wheat growers, but also to society in general. Advanced understanding of plant defense systems and deploying it to control plant diseases is a timely economical solution to increase food supply and reduce use of pesticides.