Climate change is making it increasingly difficult to produce enough major cereal crops like wheat, rice, barley and corn to feed the growing population. Quinoa can be a valuable alternative, helping to tackle hunger, malnutrition and poverty as well as improving diets. Leading scientists, practitioners and decision-makers from the public and private sectors will meet to discuss opportunities for collaboration as well as showcasing the latest developments in research, production and trade. Read more >>
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The recent breakthrough in decoding the genetic sequence of wheat could lead to significant increases in global wheat yields, according to British researchers.
The discovery, which reveals 95% of all wheat genes, will help to develop key genetic improvements, such as resistance to drought or high salinity, to one of the world’s oldest and most important crops.
The research team, who were funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) have publicly shared their sequence coverage data online for scientists across the world to access.
Prof Keith Edwards, a member of the team, said,
The genome sequences are an important tool for researchers and for plant breeders and by making the data publicly available we are ensuring this publicly funded research has the widest possible impact.
With the recent short-term price spikes in the wheat market, our food system has been shown to be vulnerable to shocks and potential shortages. According to the BBSRC, this new knowledge will help to select wheat varieties that can thrive in challenging conditions.
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As part of GCARD 2010, Farming First hosted a session entitled ‘Better Benefiting the Poor through Public-Private Partnerships for Innovation and Action.’ Within the discussions, our panel of experts addressed several case studies that present different ways that partnerships have helped to empower smallholder farmers around the world.
Marco Ferroni – Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture
The Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) in 2009 developed a two-year public-private partnership between Syngenta and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) to rapidly identify and map genetic markers for use in wheat resistance breeding against Ug99 stem rust, a fungal disease which can cause devastating crop losses.
The project, funded by the Foundation, will combine Syngenta’s plant genetic profiling expertise with the strengths of CIMMYT’s extensive field research to develop a genetic map of wheat stem rust resistance. This will culminate in the development of wheat varieties that can better resist the disease. The results from this project will contribute directly to the global efforts to combat stem rust, which are coordinated by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative coordinated by Cornell University. The marker data arising from the research will be published.
This important collaboration brings together complementary skills and addresses a pressing need of farmers in many developing countries. Ug99 stem rust, which first emerged in Uganda in 1999, is caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis. It is currently spreading across Africa, Asia and the Middle East with potential to spread further, posing a serious risk to wheat, the world’s third most important food crop.
Along with rice, wheat is a major food crop and is crucial for global food security – it provides 500 kilocalories of food energy per capita per day in China and India, and can provide up to 50 percent of daily calorie uptake in Central and West Asia or North African countries. Wheat yields need to rise 1.6 percent each year to reach required global production levels by 2020, yet investments in wheat technology have lagged far behind those for other cereals.
The scientific objectives of this project are:
1) To identify, characterize and map Durable Plant Resistance Quantitative Trait Loci conferring tolerance to stem rust resistance in wheat.
2) To identify molecular markers flanking the chromosomal regions containing these durable genes to be subsequently used in marker assisted trait selection.
3) To characterise the Sr2 gene complex and understand how this complex of gene(s) interacts with other important genes in wheat.
