“Essentially we have uncovered a goldmine,” said Simon Griffiths, a geneticist at the John Innes Centre and one of the project’s leaders.
“This is going to make an enormous difference to our ability to feed the world as it gets hotter and agriculture comes under increasing climatic strain.”.
This wheat was derived from wild varieties that were originally domesticated and cultivated in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, 10,000 years ago.
Scientists had wanted to pinpoint and study the wheat genes in the Watkins collection after the development of large-scale DNA sequencing more than a decade ago, but faced an unusual problem.
Astonishingly, this data revealed that modern wheat varieties only make use of 40% of the genetic diversity found in the collection.
“We have found that the Watkins collection is packed full of useful variation which is simply absent in modern wheat,” said Griffiths.
He realised that genetic diversity – in this case, of wheat – was being eroded and that we badly needed to halt that. »
