Salt-tolerant wheat targeted by Oxford scientists
17 March 2008
A unique project at Oxford University to develop salt-tolerant wheat has been made possible by a $9.7m grant from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).
As world wheat prices hit a record high, and populations continue to grow, finding ways to expand the capacity to grow wheat in many countries in a way that is environmentally-friendly is a priority.
Yet where wheat is grown using intensive irrigation, as in many areas including Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, the increasing salinity of the soil caused by irrigation is a problem.
Professor Nick Harberd of Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, who will lead the new project, said: ‘It’s rather like being able to get in a time machine and travel back 10-15,000 years to when wheat was first domesticated: we can use the very latest advances in genome biology to go back to first principles and ask: ‘what do we want from this crop?’ and then bring natural plant genes into domesticated crop varieties. We are hugely grateful to KAUST for funding this unique project.’
The wheat varieties that make up the bread we eat are drawn from a very limited gene pool: the small number of ancestral wheat plants that hybridized to create the wheat we know today. By comparing the genotypes of domestic and wild wheat the researchers aim to give high-yield domestic wheat some of the attributes of its hardier wild relatives through natural genetic crossing.
Professor Harberd commented: ‘Using state-of-the-art genome science we aim to identify and use genes from the whole range of the wild grass gene pool to develop wheat that has increased tolerance of high salinity and other environmental stresses. On its own salt-tolerant bread wheat is no magic bullet, but as part of a raft of measures it could help increase wheat production without costing us the environment. The Twenty-First Century will be the genome century and, hopefully, research projects like ours will show that genomic science can help to tackle the global problems that affect us all.’
KAUST are supporting the work through The Global Research Partnership (GRP), their extramural research programme. In August 2007, under its first GRP call, KAUST invited major universities around the world to propose leading edge research projects to address global problems that are particularly important in Saudi Arabia and the region. 38 universities submitted proposals and, after a competitive peer reviewed process, the project led by Professor Nick Harberd of the Department of Plant Sciences, ‘Crop-plant domestication in the genome-biology era’, was one of those funded under the KAUST Investigator award scheme. The funding amount was $9.7m over five years.
For more information contact Professor Nick Harberd on +44 (0)1865 275071 or email nicholas.harberd@plants.ox.ac.uk Alternatively contact Pete Wilton in the University of Oxford Press Office on +44 (0)1865 283877 or email press.office@admin.ox.ac.uk