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Wheat Genotyping: An Invaluable Service

Wheat Genotyping: An Invaluable Service
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Helping plant breeders develop new wheat varieties with improved disease resistance, stress tolerance and other desirable traits is the goal of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists based at four regional small-grains genotyping centers.

Ranked third behind corn and soybeans in planted acreage and gross receipts, wheat is a major crop used in everything from flour and baked goods to crackers and pancakes. Yet insects and diseases pose a constant threat to the crop's productivity. Fortunately, new advances in the field of genomics are speeding scientists' identification of new traits to keep wheat healthy and productive in the face of these and other threats.

For example, at the ARS in Pullman, Wash., geneticist Deven See leads a team tasked with furnishing wheat and barley breeders in five states--Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho and Montana--with genetic profiles of their germplasm materials. See estimates at least 60 percent of genotyping requests received from breeders there are for genes conferring resistance to a fungal disease called stripe rust.

In Pacific Northwest production areas, stripe rust can inflict yield losses of up to 40 percent. Conventional methods of screening germplasm for resistance genes can take months to complete. Now, thanks to the genotypic services offered by See's group, coupled with the use of a technique called marker-assisted selection, breeders can identify resistant germplasm within a few days.

Source: USDA Agricultural Research Service

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This sounds all nice and everything but what are we doing to ourselves by making the wheat and other crops take on attributes that could possibly affect us as the consumers of these resistant crops?

Wheat Genotyping: An Invaluable Service UFO & Writing Art Education Sciences

Japan and South Korea Bar Imports of U.S. Wheat:

Japan and South Korea suspended some imports of American wheat, and the European Union urged its 27 nations to increase testing, after the United States government disclosed this week that a strain of genetically engineered wheat that was never approved for sale was found growing in an Oregon field. Ref. Source 8

Service Invaluable Genotyping Wheat

Extreme weather conditions and climate change account for 40% of global wheat production variability. A new approach for identifying the impacts of climate change and extreme weather on the variability of global and regional wheat production has been proposed by researchers. The study analyzed the effect of heat and water anomalies on crop losses over a 30-year period. Source 9b.

Service Invaluable Genotyping Wheat

How humans transformed wild wheat into its modern counterpart. A sophisticated sequencing study reveals genetic changes that emerged in wheat as it became domesticated by agricultural societies in the Fertile Crescent, roughly 10,000 years ago. Source 1z

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Protecting wheat from wheat blast fungus, a potentially devastating disease. Scientists have uncovered an important link to a disease which left unchecked could prove devastating to wheat. Source 4h.

Wheat Genotyping: An Invaluable Service

Wheat disease breakthrough to help feed the world. Famine may be largely a thing of the past but in recent years the re-emergence of a disease that can kill wheat -- which provides a fifth of humanity's food -- has threatened food security; now a wheat stem rust breakthrough is being announced. Source 9o.