Scientists at Rothamsted Research have made a series of unexpected discoveries within the wheat genome which they say should lead to new wheat varieties over the coming years. These varieties could include improved traits such as greater disease resistance and better adaptation to climate change.
The UK institute’s website reports that researchers examined nearly 1,300 ‘promoter’ regions that regulate the activity of genes in 95 different commercial, landrace and ancestral wheats. “The team have shown that these promoter regions are remarkably similar when different wheat varieties are compared,” the website reports.
“That these promoter regions have remained mostly unchanged means that they are likely to be as important as the part of the gene coding for proteins – and that when slight differences between individual varieties are seen these could have significant impacts on plant traits. Such traits include grain quality, nutrient use efficiency, disease resistance, and adaptation to climate change.”
First author Dr. Michael Hammond-Kosack, told the website that this new research provides a potential gold-mine for plant breeders and researchers looking to improve crops. “Despite many decades of work to produce better and higher yielding varieties, on-farm wheat yield increases have stagnated in recent years,” he said.
“Most molecular breeding efforts have focused on trying different sequence combinations solely based on the protein coding parts of the genes directly responsible for traits. What we have shown is that these regulatory regions could be just as important as targets for improvement.”
The findings have already been made available to the plant breeding industry, with a great deal of interest in the results, the website reports.
A second unexpected discovery, says the website, was that promoter sequence variation found in some wheat landraces and in an ancestral einkorn wheat could also be found in many commercial wheat varieties. These sequence variations are now immediately available for exploration in commercial wheat breeding, says the website
Importantly, it says, despite the promoters being highly conserved, the team did find some sequence differences across promoter regions with many of those residing within binding sites for proteins that switch genes on or off.
The limited sequence variation in the whole promoter regions means these small variations we have discovered in various varieties are likely to play a significant role in the plant’s biology, project leader and co-author, Dr. Kim Hammond-Kosack told the website.
“Conventional wisdom had suggested promoters were less important than gene coding sequences in determining the resulting wheat plant, and that over time the promoter sequences would have diverged more than the protein coding sequences,” she said. “We now know that is not the case.”
The website says: “With the information the team have discovered, plant breeders and academics now have the ability to mix and match genes based on their different promoter sequence variants and not just protein variation as before.”
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