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.