By Trina Kleist
Key advances made by scientists in the UC Davis Small Grains Breeding Program already have pointed a path to wheat that is more nutritious, more plentiful and more profitable for farmers. Now, that work will be boosted by a $618,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.
The latest project is led by Xiaofei Zhang, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and leader of the breeding program. Zhang and team aim to produce wheat that needs fewer inputs such as water and fertilizer, yet still produces nutritious grain at high volumes, and reliably.
“Farmers need varieties that perform when water and other inputs are limited,” Zhang said. “This work is about delivering more stable yields and better grain quality under real-world conditions.”
Their focus is on wheat grown to bake bread – in particular, hard red spring wheat. New varieties Zhang and team develop will be made available to breeding programs in the U.S. as they share their results and the seeds they produce with other scientists and with farmers.
The researchers are building on the breakthrough that sparked the Green Revolution of the 1960s: The discovery of genes that make wheat and other staples grow short meant the plant could redirect its energy from growing tall to growing more seeds. In the subsequent decades, cereal production roughly doubled.
“Wheat breeding has relied on the same dwarfing genes for more than 50 years,” Zhang said. “Those genes worked extremely well in high-input systems, but agriculture is changing. Our goal is to develop varieties that maintain yield under water-limited and lower-input conditions.”
Source : ucdavis.edu