This groundbreaking discovery may lead to development of better varieties of wheat.
This groundbreaking discovery may lead to development of better varieties of wheat.
Wheat has been an immensely important crop for humankind. It was wheat that enabled humans to transform from hunter-gatherers to food producers and turned them from a non-dominant species to rulers of the planet. The crop alone forms vital part of the diet of billions of people around the world.
However, Global Warming and Climate Change have begun to have an effect on produce of wheat. With increasingly intense heatwaves, storms and more, there is a threat to the vital crop that feeds humankind. Efforts of scientists to create a more robust type of wheat ready for new challenges was hitting a dead end for years due to complex genome of wheat. But now, a scientific breakthrough may take us a step closer to meeting the challenges of a changing world that wheat has to survive in.
The breakthrough has been achieved by researchers at John Innes Centre in Norwich. It is the leading crop research institute in the world. The new variety has been created, in part, with the help of gene-editing technology.
Normal wheat has what is called a stabilising gene that segregates different chromosomes into its different genome. But it also opposes exchange of traits with wild wheat, which is more resilient to elements and has many desirable traits which scientists wanted to incorporate in wheat varieties which are cultivated on large scale.
This gene was called the ‘Holy grail’ of wheat genes. The researchers have now truly discovered it. The researchers have named it Zip4.5B and created a mutant which does not impede exchange of traits from wild varieties of wheat.
This groundbreaking discovery may lead to development of better varieties of wheat.
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