| Description |
This project presents the outcomes of an international collaborative research project (mostly between China and UK) on wheat genomics and breeding spanning 27 institutions and 88 researchers over 10 years. In this initiative, we sequenced and analyzed the entire A.E. Watkins wheat landrace collection (827 accessions) and a diversity-maximised set of twentieth-century modern wheat varieties (208 accessions). This facilitated the construction of a comprehensive bread wheat genetic variation map, and the LD-based short-range as well as the IBS-based long-range haplotype map, including 262M SNPs, gene copy number variations, and 71,000 haploblocks. Using this variation map, we identified seven ancestral groups for bread wheat and found that modern varietal accessions trace back to just two of these ancestral groups. More than half of sequence variants were absent from the modern wheat samples and thus, despite their potential benefit, remain unavailable to current breeding strategies aimed at bolstering global food production. Rigorous field experiments and systematic phenotyping, encompassing a dataset exceeding 2 million data points, underscore the profound value of this resource for trait dissection, gene discovery and delivery into breeding. We thus conducted genome-wide association studies, classical quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping, \and high-resolution Nested Association Mapping for a wide range of important breeding targets (137 traits, across ten years in ten environments). Our research unveiled highly beneficial loci for critical breeding targets such as grain yield, nitrogen use efficiency, plant height, crop development, mineral content, and yellow rust resistance. Importantly, many of these loci were associated with genes not previously implicated in the regulation of these traits, as well as from novel functional polymorphisms regulating known genes, many of these useful genetic variants have been introgressed into modern cultivars, with a systematic test in the field experiments. Through the development of this unprecedented scale of genomic, genetic and informatics resources, we focus on breeding barriers for wheat, caused by narrowed genetic diversity owing to geo-historical origins of the modern crop, trait antagonism, and the challenge of precisely breeding beneficial traits. We present an efficient and effective barrier-breaking solution via the development of unique genomics and genetics resources. |
