Moore Foundation grantee Jorge Dubcovsky at the University of California, Davis and his colleagues developed a much-needed genetic resource that will greatly accelerate the study of gene functions in wheat, a vital crop supplying 20 percent of the calories consumed by humans worldwide.
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.
To maintain food security, wheat breeders are working to develop plants that offer more nutritional value, have greater yields, and can thrive in a changing climate.
However, like many plants, wheat is a polyploid, meaning it has multiple copies of its genome in every cell. In polyploid organisms mutations in individual genes often have no apparent effect, because additional copies of the mutated gene compensate for the loss. This characteristic makes it difficult for researchers to study how an individual gene functions.
Dubcovsky, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Moore Foundation Plant Biology investigator, 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.
To make it possible to analyze the DNA of all of the lines, the researchers developed an approach that let them focus on the small fraction of the genome that encodes proteins. Focusing on this small portion of each plant's genome, the team sequenced 400 billion bases of DNA using sophisticated sequencing technology to analyze the plants that grew from the mutated seeds — a total of 2,735 wheat lines.
The team's findings are "a game changer for our community," said Dubcovsky. The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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