Investigating gas-exchange performance between wheat landraces and commercial varieties

Improvement of photosynthetic traits in crops to increase yield potential and crop resilience has recently become a major breeding target. Synthetic biology and genetic technologies offer unparalleled opportunities to create new genetics for photosynthetic traits driven by existing fundamental knowledge. However, large “gene bank” collections of germplasm comprising of historical collections of crop species and their relatives offer a wealth of opportunities to find novel allelic variation in the key steps of photosynthesis, to identify new mechanisms and to accelerate genetic progress in crop breeding programs. Here we explore the available genetic resources in food and fibre crops, strategies to selectively target allelic variation in genes underpinning key photosynthetic processes and deployment of this variation via gene editing in modern elite material.

通过改良作物光合性状以提升产量潜力与抗逆性，现已成为作物育种的核心目标之一。合成生物学与遗传技术依托现有基础研究框架，为培育具有新型光合性状的作物提供了前所未有的机遇。然而，包含作物物种及其近缘物种历史馆藏的大型种质资源基因库（Gene Bank），为发掘光合关键通路中的新型等位基因变异、解析全新调控机制以及加速作物育种进程提供了丰富契机。本研究聚焦粮食与纤维作物的可用遗传资源，探讨精准靶向调控光合关键通路基因的等位变异的策略，并阐释如何通过基因编辑技术将此类变异应用于现代优良种质材料的改良中。