Enriching and Understanding the Wheat Genome by Inducing Secondary Homoeologous Recombination.

Wheat is a major food grain source for humans in the US and worldwide. Wheat production has been continually threatened by various biological and environmental stresses, such as new diseases, insects, and climate variability/change. There is a constant need to enhance the genetic potential of wheat in sustaining and improving wheat production under emerging threats. In recent years, the genetic gain for wheat production has declined due to the draining of the primary gene pool in wheat breeding. The limited genetic variability of the wheat genome has increasingly become a bottleneck for wheat improvement. However, wheat has a huge secondary and tertiary gene pool (i.e. wheat-related wild species) with tremendous genetic variability, representing an invaluable gene source for wheat breeding. The long-term goal of this project are to enrich the wheat genome for wheat improvement by harnessing the genetic diversity of wheat-related wild grasses and to understand the wheat genome by chromosome manipulation.