John Innes Centre

Wheat genome project to underpin food security

February 2009

UK scientists have been awarded £1.7 million to analyse the genomes of five varieties of wheat, in order to help farmers increase the yield and disease resistance of British wheat varieties.

Bread wheat, with an estimated world harvest of more than 550 million tonnes, is one of the most important food crops in the world and is worth more than £2 billion to the UK’s agricultural industry.

“Wheat production world-wide has not kept up with demand and is under threat from drought and new diseases,” said Professor Mike Bevan from the John Innes Centre. “We need to use modern genomic technologies to help breed varieties that will be more adaptable, higher yielding, and which resist diseases that cause major crop losses”.

The wheat genome is five times larger than the human genome and bread wheat is actually made up of three closely related genomes. Most of the wheat genome is “junk DNA” that does not encode any genes. At JIC scientists will develop methods to fish out the important regions of five wheat varieties for sequencing. These lines carry much needed traits such as disease resistance, improved quality and yield.

The project will also provide a large amount of sequence data for the future genome sequencing of wheat. Professor Neil Hall and Dr Anthony Hall, from the University of Liverpool, and Professor Mike Bevan from the John Innes Centre will carry out the sequencing work using complementary approaches.

The planned BBSRC Genome Analysis Centre in Norwich and the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge will also play a key role in this important project.

Professor Neil Hall said: “New DNA sequencing technology can read 500 million separate letters of DNA in a single day – hundreds of times faster than the systems that were used to sequence the human genome.”

The research is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). The John Innes Centre is an institute of the BBSRC.

Contacts

JIC Press Office
Photos available
Zoe Dunford, Tel: 01603 255111, email: zoe.dunford@bbsrc.ac.uk
Andrew Chapple, Tel: 01603 251490, email: andrew.chapple@bbsrc.ac.uk

Notes to editors:

  • DNA sequencing has been pioneered by institutes such as the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Institute in Cambridge. It was here that scientists decoded a record-breaking two billion letters of DNA in the human genome.  The technology used to do this, however, was very large and complex and had to be housed in specially constructed buildings.  The new state-of-the-art instruments are no larger than a photocopier.
  • The John Innes Centre, www.jic.ac.uk, is an independent, world-leading research centre in plant and microbial sciences with over 800 staff. JIC is based on Norwich Research Park and carries out high quality fundamental, strategic and applied research to understand how plants and microbes work at the molecular, cellular and genetic levels. The JIC also trains scientists and students, collaborates with many other research laboratories and communicates its science to end-users and the general public. The JIC is grant-aided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
  • The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK funding agency for research in the life sciences. Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around £420 million in a wide range of research that makes a significant contribution to the quality of life for UK citizens and supports a number of important industrial stakeholders including the agriculture, food, chemical, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. BBSRC carries out its mission by funding internationally competitive research, providing training in the biosciences, fostering opportunities for knowledge transfer and innovation and promoting interaction with the public and other stakeholders on issues of scientific interest in universities, centres and institutes.
  • The University of Liverpool is a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive institutions in the UK. It attracts collaborative and contract research commissions from a wide range of national and international organisations valued at more than £93 million annually.