Improving wheat’s heat resilience

FLINDERS University and researchers from Queensland’s Longreach Plant Breeders are joining forces to improve drought and heat resilience in wheat.
Chief investigator Professor Kathleen Soole with College of Science and Engineering molecular science and technology researchers Dr Crystal Sweet­man and Associate Professor Colin Jenkins will sample South Australian wheat crops and grain for the new project launched this month by Washington State University.
Funding to identify new genes in spring wheat which would allow it to be more heat and drought resilient will be backed by a Seeding Solutions grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, WSU, the Washington Grain Com­mission, Flinders University, Longreach Plant Breeders, and the OA Vogel Wheat Research Fund.
Flinders and Longreach researchers will work together to screen wheat varieties in multiple locations in South Australia, looking for stress resilient cultivars and genetic markers in Australian field conditions and comparing them with findings from the international field sites.
“This is a fantastic opportunity,” Dr Sweetman said.
“We hope to identify drought and heat tolerance mechanisms that are important not only in Australia, but across a range of geographical locations.”
Increasing heat accompanied by low soil moisture content also makes plants produce highly toxic chemicals known as reactive oxygen species, which in turn lowers yield.
The new research is targeting the genetic markers which correlate with lower ROS production.
If those markers are found, then breeding programs can exploit those to develop varieties with reduced damage from reactive oxygen species.
This project features test sites in Washington, Mexico and Australia.
“There’s no simple way to find out how plants cope with in­creased heat and drought conditions at the genetic level,” WSU Institute of Biological Chemistry Associate Professor and lead investigator Andrei Smertenko said.
“Discovery of the resiliency genes is difficult because chemical reactions inside plants are hard to observe.
“We hope measuring wheat varieties adapted to different geographical locations will reveal genetic markers of lower oxidative damage.”