In collaboration with the
Elm Farm Research
Centre (Dr Martin Wolfe, Dr Kay Hinchsliffe).
The potential for the adaptation of wheat to UK
environments has been constrained by the framework of the pedigree selection
method that has dominated plant breeding for a century. The relatively
limited number and range of true-breeding genotypes that are produced lack
the ability to adapt to different and changing environments, thus increasing
the need for synthetic inputs. The research is addressing this by
identifying traits or sets of traits that determine or improve adaptation of
wheat to the range of UK arable environments, production systems and
markets. The project has developed composite cross populations of
wheat based on a wide range of key parent varieties, and these are being
exposed to a range of widely different agricultural environments and systems
through several seasons of, largely, natural selection. Performance of
the population samples will be compared at different stages against both the
parents grown as pure stands and as physical mixtures, and also analysed by
molecular markers to look at changes of allele frequencies over generations.
