Amarillo, Texas
February 17, 2006
A new $5 million grant to wheat
breeders could shorten the time between the outbreak of diseases
and the development of resistant wheat varieties, said the
Texas Agricultural
Experiment Station state wheat breeder.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced the U.S. Department
of Agriculture's Cooperative State Research, Education and
Extension Service will administer the award through the National
Research Initiative.
The research supported by the
grant is called "marker assisted selection," said Dr. Jackie
Rudd, Experiment Station state wheat breeder in Amarillo. Marker
assisted selection takes genome research from the laboratory to
the field via new disease-resistant, high quality varieties.
Texas' portion of the $5 million
grant will be $182,750 over four years, Rudd said. The
Experiment Station recognized the value of this program to Texas
wheat producers and matched the first two years of funding with
a Cropping Systems Program grant.
Some of the money will go directly
to Dr. Monica Menz, director of the Plant Genome Technology
Laboratory at the Texas A&M University Institute for Plant
Genome Biotechnology, and her work with leaf rust resistance.
Another portion will be utilized by Dr. Yiqun Weng, Experiment
Station research scientist in Amarillo, who is working with
greenbug resistance.
Rust problems alone reduced the
grain yield of the Texas wheat crop by about 20 percent last
year, Rudd said. This cooperative technology will not only help
to combat that, but will help produce better grain products and
help maintain the international competitiveness of U.S. wheat.
A traditional breeding program
evaluates genetic variability of a selected line of wheat by
planting it over several years in many locations, and then
determining if it has the resistance needed, Rudd said.
"It's a ‘what you see is not what
you get' situation," he said. "This new grant will help us look
at the DNA of a wheat plant to determine what genes it has
before it is planted, rather than wait to see if it is expressed
in the field. It's a way of increasing our overall efficiency."
Texas' Experiment Station
wheat-breeding program has been working to identify the
molecular markers for leaf rust resistance and greenbug
resistance for the past five years, Rudd said.
Molecular markers can be a piece
of DNA, near a gene or within a gene, that signals the presence
of a useful trait such as disease resistance.
In traditional breeding, if 1,000
rows of wheat lines are planted, about half will be thrown out
due to stripe or leaf rust problems, he said.
"If we can look at the DNA before
planting those rows and determine they have the effective
resistance genes, we can be more selective in our planting,"
Rudd said.
Leaf rust resistance, for
instance, is hard to maintain because the pathogen changes,
sometimes as often as every few years, he said. A more durable
resistance can be obtained by combining genes that may only have
partial resistance individually. This can be done much more
efficiently using molecular markers.
The genetic information will be
stored in national databases and seed stocks deposited in USDA's
Small Grain Collection, providing long-term public access of
genetic information and resources for the wheat breeders and
researchers nationwide, USDA officials said.
Wheat is one of the few major
crops where public sector researchers are largely responsible
for providing new varieties for farmers, Rudd said.
The grant will bring these public
wheat-breeding programs into a community, making the most
efficient use of the public money.
"This is a great example of how
public money can be brought together and allow us to accomplish
what none of us could accomplish individually," he said. |