VATIS UPDATE Article

Scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the United States, have developed a much-needed genetic resource that will greatly accelerate the study of gene functions in wheat. The resource, a collection of wheat seeds with more than 10 million sequenced and carefully catalogued genetic mutations, is freely available to wheat breeders and researchers, and is already aiding in the development of wheat plants with improved traits.

Jorge Dubcovsky, at HHMI, and Betty Moore, at the University of California, the United States, and Cristobal Uauy, at the John Innes Institute, the United Kingdom, led the development of this new genetic tool. To study the function of an individual gene, researchers typically mutate or eliminate that gene to find out what happens – an approach known as reverse genetics. But in a polyploid organism such as wheat, mutations in individual genes often have no apparent effect, because additional copies of the mutated gene compensate for the loss.

Researchers must cross plants with mutations in different copies of the gene several times to obtain a generation of plants in which the gene’s function is lost. The gene copies also hide natural variation in the wheat genome that could create opportunities to selectively breed plants with useful traits. Dubcovsky and his colleagues chemically induced random genetic mutations in thousands of wheat seeds and began developing and characterizing their collection of wheat mutant lines more than five years ago.