ARS | Publication request: The prospects for manipulation of rye genes for wheat improvement

Submitted to: Plant and Animal Genome Conference
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: December 15, 2006
Publication Date: January 15, 2007
Citation: Gustafson, J.P., Shi, B., Borlaug, N.E., Collins, N., Jacobs, A., Button, J., Zhou, H., Gustafson, N., Chand, J., Musket, T., Langridge, P. 2007. The prospects for manipulation of rye genes for wheat improvement [abstract]. Plant and Animal Genome Conference, January 2007, San Diego, California. Paper No. W230.

Technical Abstract: United Nations projections are that by the year 2040 an increase in world cereal production of approximately 66% is needed to keep up with world population growth. This increase in agricultural production will come from utilizing existing production areas, and/or new lands. Crop production can be improved by manipulating its genotype and/or management practices. Understanding the isolation and characterization of genes or gene complexes, and their expression when placed into wheat is critical to manipulating the many abiotic stress, disease, and pest problems currently affecting wheat production. This presentation is designed to illustrate the problems and prospects for the manipulation of abiotic stress genes from wheat relatives, in particular rye, for cereal improvement. Rye was chosen because it is an out-crossing species that contains high levels of genetic variation, the existence of wheat/rye hybrids (triticale), and rye is highly tolerant to both acid and saline soils, frost tolerant, zinc efficient, disease resistant, self-incompatible, has a vigorous root system, and can also grow on drought prone and sandy soils. By exploiting rice/rye syntenic relationships, a region in rye delimiting an aluminum tolerance locus was characterized. To assist positional cloning of this locus, a rye BAC library was created (373,632 clones averaging 132 kb). Less than 1% of clones were from the chloroplast genome and only 0.02% of the clones were from the mitochondrial genome. The markers flanking the aluminum tolerance locus will be of value to wheat breeders in their attempts to incorporate rye aluminum tolerance into wheat. The rye BAC library will be of value in any future attempts to clone rye value-added traits of interest for utilization in wheat breeding programs designed to improve wheat production by manipulating gene complexes from rye into wheat.