Wheat Research Set To Open Breeding Door
Category: Grains, Miscellaneous
(Farm Weekly) – BREAKTHROUGH research by the University of WA could open up more opportunities for finding drought tolerant wheat varieties.
Plant geneticist and plant breeder Guijun Yan, from UWA’s School of Agriculture and Environment and Institute of Agriculture, led the world-first research to develop climate ready crops that are adapted to water stress.
His research focused on terminal drought tolerance – where dry conditions occur later in the growing stage from booting to flowering when plants undergo reproduction.
Professor Yan said drought was a big problem in WA farming and across the world due to climate change and global warming, which led to an increased instance of drought.
“Therefore we are doing major research into drought tolerance mainly because we don’t have irrigation options in WA,” Professor Yan said.
“The only way to solve the problem is to grow plants that are tolerant to drought conditions.”
He said it had long been established that drought damaged the male gametes in wheat reproduction, but little was known about its affect on female gametes.
“Traditionally people have looked at this process and thought that the male part is mainly affected by drought because the male part is exposed,” he said.
“Drought conditions impact on pollen availability and low pollen availability means low fertilisation, which means lower seed set.”
As part of the research, water was withheld during the reproductive phase, meiosis, in 46 different wheat varieties from Australia and overseas, to examine what effect the induced drought had on the viability of male and female reproductive parts of the plant.
Grain number was used to measure the effect of drought stress.
Professor Yan said the results indicated that both the male and female parts were sensitive to water stress during meiosis, not just the male part as was previously thought.
“We identified for the first time that the stressed female reproductive part was one of the major contributors to low grain numbers in wheat varieties that were water-stressed during meiosis,” he said.
