20:20 Wheat ®

Principal Investigator: Martin Parry

Increasing wheat productivity to yield 20 tonnes per hectare in 20 years.

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Ensuring food security is a major challenge for the future. Wheat provides a fifth of human calories, but since 1980 the rate of increase in wheat yields has declined. The average farm yield of wheat in the UK is currently 8.4 tonnes per hectare. Our aim is to provide the knowledge base and tools to increase UK wheat yield potential to 20 tonnes of wheat per hectare within the next 20 years.

Building on the expertise at Rothamsted Research, this strategic theme will be delivered through four programmes:

  1. Maximizing yield potential. With the requirement for novel approaches to increase yield, we will focus on genotype improvement to improve total crop biomass and grain yield through improved photosynthetic efficiency, altered canopy and root architecture, modified seed development and enhanced nutrient utilisation efficiency. This will be introduced utilising breeding, exploiting novel germplasm, transgenesis and other forms of genome remodelling. The potential for these approaches to offer substantial increases in yield is exemplified by the difference between C3 and C4 plants, where, for a given volume of water, photosynthetic efficiencies can be 50% higher in a C4 plant because of the suppression of photorespiration (1, 2, 3, 4).

  2. Protecting yield potential. We will use advanced technologies to mitigate losses through pests and diseases. This will encompass the aetiological agents for Septoria leaf blotch, Fusarium ear blight and “Take-all” which have the highest negative impacts on wheat yields in the UK and elsewhere. Robust solutions to these diseases could contribute 5 to 10% in average yield increases (5, 6, 7).

  3. Determining soil resource interactions. We will develop a mechanistic understanding of how soil properties and root characteristics interact to determine water uptake and nutrient acquisition. Efficient water utilisation is a prerequisite for efficient photosynthesis and yet wheat can be very sensitive to changes in osmotic potential resulting in reduced photosynthetic efficiency. The potential of this approach to contribute substantially to yield could be in the region of 10 to 18% (8, 9).

  4. Using systems approaches to crop improvement. We will, through crop models based on physiological and environmental parameters, explore gene-environment interactions, deconvolute complex traits (e.g resource-use efficiency) and explore the performance of wheat ideotypes under climate change (10).

1. Barraclough, P. B., Howarth, J. R., Jones, J., Lopez-Bellido, R., Parmar, S., Shepherd, C. E. & Hawkesford, M. J. (2010) Nitrogen efficiency of wheat: genotypic and environmental variation and prospects for improvement. European Journal of Agronomy 33, 1-11. DOI: 10.1016/j.eja.2010.01.005

2. Rieu, I., Ruiz-Rivero, O., Fernandez-Garcia, N., Griffiths, J., Powers, S. J., Gong, F., Linhartova, T., Eriksson, S., Nilsson, O.,Thomas, S. G., Phillips, A. L. & Hedden, P. (2008) The gibberellin biosynthetic genes AtGA20ox1 and AtGA20ox2 act, partially redundantly, to promote growth and development throughout the Arabidopsis life cycle. The Plant Journal 53, 488-504. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-313X.2007.03356.x

3. Parry, M. A. J., Reynolds. M., Salvucci, M. E., Raines, C., Andralojc, P. J., Zhu, X.-G., Price, G. D., Condon, A. G. & Furbank, R.(2011) Raising yield potential of wheat: increasing photosynthetic capacity and efficiency. Journal of Experimental Botany 62, 453-468. DOI: 10.1093/jxb/erq304

4. Ward, J. L., Baker, J. M., Llewellyn, A. M., Hawkins, N. D. & Beale, M. H. (2011) Metabolomic analysis of Arabidopsis reveals hemiterpenoid glycosides as products of a nitrate ion regulated, carbon flux overflow. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108, 10762-10767. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1018875108

5. Ma L-J. et al. (2010) Comparative genomics reveals mobile pathogenicity chromosomes in Fusarium. Nature 464, 367-373. DOI: 10.1038/nature08850

6. Marshall, R., Kombrink, A., Motteram, J., Loza-Reyes, E.,Lucas, J. A., Hammond-Kosack, K. E., Thomma, B. P. H. J. & Rudd, J. J. (2011) Analysis of two in planta expressed LysM effector homologues from the fungus Mycosphaerella graminicola reveals novel functional properties and varying contributions to virulence on wheat. Plant Physiology 156, 756-769. DOI: 10.1104/pp.111.176347

7. Goodwin, S. B. et al. (2011) The finished genome of the fungal wheat pathogen Mycosphaerella graminicola reveals dispensome structure, chromosome plasticity and stealth pathogenesis. PLoS Genetics 7, e1002070. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1002070

8. Chapman, N., Whalley, W. R., Lindsey, K. & Miller, A. J. (2011) Water supply and not nitrate concentration determines primary root growth in Arabidopsis. Plant Cell and Environment 34, 1630-1638. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-3040.2011.02358.x

9. McMillan, V. E., Hammond-Kosack, K. E. & Gutteridge, R. J. (2011) Evidence that wheat varieties differ in their ability to build-up inoculum of the take-all fungus, Gaeumannomyces graminis var. tritici, under a first wheat crop. Plant Pathology 60, 200-206. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-3059.2010.02375.x

10. Semenov, M. A. & Shewry, P. R. (2011) Modelling predicts that heat stress, not drought, will increase vulnerability of wheat in Europe. Scientific Reports 1, 66 doi:10.1038/srep00066. DOI: 10.1038/srep00066

 

 
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