Miller Magazine Issue:114 June 2019

20 NEWS JUNE 2019 K-State researchers find new clues for ımproving wheat A team of Kansas State University wheat scien- tists are tapping into 10,000 years of evolution in the plant’s genetic code as part of their continued efforts to understand how historic processes that shaped modern wheat can help to improve the va- rieties grown by today’s farmers. The exhaustive study, which is published in Nature Genetics, invol- ved sequencing the genomes of nearly 1,000 wheat lines collected from different parts of the world with different environments. The work was led by resear- chers from K-State and Agriculture Victoria of Aust- ralia, in collaboration with the University of Saskat- chewan (Canada) and the University of Minnesota. “We compared the genomes (in the 1,000 wheat lines) against each other, and looked for nucleoti- de base changes, or mutations, that distinguish one wheat accession from another,” said Eduard Akhu- nov, a K-State wheat geneticist. He noted that the researchers found more than 7 million differences in the genetic code of the 1,000 lines. “These diffe- rences can affect the function of genes that control various traits in wheat that helped it adapt to new growth conditions, such as withstanding drought and heat stresses; fighting off diseases; and yielding nutritious grain,” Akhunov said. The changes that occurred in the genetic code can tell researchers a history of each wheat accession. “When humans started spreading wheat from the site of its origin to other places, they brought it into contact with wild wheat, and wild ancestors acciden- tally began to inter-breed with bread wheat,” Ak- hunov said. “What happened then was that bread wheat inherited the genetic diversity that was pre- sent in the wild emmer wheat.” That process of one species sharing genes with another species is called gene flow, and it is key for explaining the genetic diversity of today’s wheat varieties, according to K-State wheat breeder Allan Fritz. “Understanding gene flow between wild em- mer and common wheat is more than just academi- cally interesting,” Fritz said. “The importance of his-