Harnessing the diversity in wild cereals plants for wheat improvement

Wheat is a staple crop, providing close to 20% of calories and proteins consumed by humanity. However, through the millennia, the process of cultivation has reduced the diversity of wheat varieties, and consequently modern wheat varieties are more vulnerable than their predecessors to diseases, pests, and climate hazards. Seeds that are stored at the wild cereals gene bank in the Institute for Cereal Crops Research (ICCR) at Tel Aviv University carry a rich variety of genetic traits. Our goal is to isolate genes for useful traits from plants in our gene bank, and use them to create improved wheat varieties. Towards this end, we established systems for fast isolation of beneficial genes from wheat wild relatives and their introduction to wheat.

We generated genetically improved core diversity panels of wheat wild relatives, produced large amounts of phenotypic and genomic data, and developed a bioinformatic pipeline for gene identification by whole genome wide association (W-GWAS). With the support of the Chief Scientist of Israel`s Ministry of Agriculture, and the Israeli Center for Genome Editing in Agriculture, we have established a center for wheat transformation and genome editing and produce a highly efficient wheat transformation protocol. These systems, together with several additional supporting systems provide a complete package for gene isolation, validation, and generation of improved wheat cultivars. We have recently used our systems to isolate and introduce to wheat a new gene that confers resistance against two pathogens that cause wheat leaf rust and stripe rust diseases.