A remarkable project launched a century ago by unassuming plant scientist Arthur Watkins is reaping benefits for modern-day wheat researchers, as they seek solutions that will sustainably feed a projected global population of 10 billion people.

Researchers in the collaborative Wheat Genetic Improvement Network (WGIN) have been funded by Defra to use precision breeding techniques to deliver wheat that is more nutritious, disease resistant and better able to withstand drought, salinity and even slugs.

This fascinating project, a hybrid of ancient and modern, owes its existence to Watkins, a shy man who shunned the limelight in his day. The only grainy image that remains sees him leaning out of a first-floor window on the fringe of a departmental gathering.

“Watkins wasn’t a famous scientist at the time but, if you read the letters he sent to his contacts across the British Empire, it is incredible how modern his thinking was,” said Dr Simon Griffiths, a group leader at the John Innes Centre and lead of the Delivering Sustainable Wheat Institute Strategic Programme (ISP).

“Watkins saw that the new systematic breeding in the early part of the 20th century was taking over and that 10,000 years of genetic diversity was rapidly being replaced by these new cultivars. His work in assembling what we now know as the A.E Watkins collection is truly visionary and only now are we beginning to see how influential he is,” continued Dr Griffiths.

Watkins was working at a time when science was fuelling dramatic changes in agriculture, as pioneers such as Sir Rowland Biffen applied the newly discovered laws of genetics towards gains in the field. Biffen was hailed a “wheat wizard” by the press of his day as grateful farmers welcomed higher yielding and better performing crops, the product of crossing using a smaller gene pool.

These gains came at a cost which only a few appreciated at the time. As breeders of the day sought to use the new improved cultivars, they began to dispense with landraces, the locally adapted wheats that had been cultivated since bread wheat first emerged in the Fertile Crescent between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago.

With remarkable foresight, Watkins saw that the genetic diversity in the landraces was being lost to a bottleneck of new systemic breeding that narrowed the base from which new elite varieties were being selected.

Using networks across the British Empire, Watkins enlisted the support of British Embassy staff, soldiers and civil servants to collect landraces from local markets. Watkins’ letters advised his correspondents to avoid experimental wheat stations where the new systematic breeding was being practised, revealing an astute grasp of the dangers of this innovation. He wanted the wheat that had been grown since the dawn of agriculture, not that which had been grown since the dawn of genetics a few decades earlier.

Watkins’ far-flung correspondents gathered more than 1,000 bread wheat landraces of which 827 from 32 countries still exist today, curated and regularly regenerated at the BBSRC-funded Germplasm Resources Unit at the John Innes Centre.

It wasn’t until recently that wheat researchers appreciated the genetic goldmine that had been bequeathed by Watkins and his network. In an international collaboration in the spirit of Watkins, which appeared in the journal Nature, researchers DNA sequenced the historic collection and 220 elite modern wheats.

This computational ultra-marathon, taking up one million gigabytes of data, revealed that modern wheat varieties make use of just 40% of the genetic diversity found in the Watkins collection. The data showed that only two of the seven ancestral groups into which the Watkins Collections can be divided are represented in modern wheat breeding.

“Wheat breeding began in France and Germany, and these European breeders built modern wheat on European landraces,” explained Dr Griffiths. “Until recently the breeding industry believed they had sampled a wide variety of the Watkins collection. It was a major surprise to discover that most of the collection – 60% – is untouched by modern breeding.”

The Watkins collection has started delivering its genetic treasure. Using the Breeders’ Toolkit, a suite of genomic resources provided by the Designing Future Wheat ISP, researchers and breeders have mined the collection for useful variation which is absent in modern wheat.

Genes controlling nitrogen use efficiency, mineral content, heat resilience, wheat blast resistance and slug resistance have already been identified. Some new wheat lines introgressed with Watkins diversity are to be part of the first field trials of gene edited wheat in the UK.

But to take full advantage of the Watkins Collection and other collections of wild relatives of wheat, Dr Griffiths believes we need a radical rethink of wheat breeding. That spirit, he believes, underpins the five-year WGIN project.

“What we are saying in this project is that we are not sure breeders did a systematic job in the first place and we need to start again,” he explained. “When we sequenced the Watkins collection, we expected to find hundreds of useful variations compared with modern wheat. In fact, the variations run into many thousands. The methods we have developed in the Breeders’ Toolkit platform amount to searching for a needle in a haystack. Now we know there are thousands of potentially useful variations in Watkins that could be employed to the benefit of modern wheat. So, we need something different.”

John Innes Centre researchers, as part of their contribution to WGIN, will use the freedom afforded by the Precision Breeding Act to gene edit and trial the Watkins Collection. This means that the tall, pre-modern landraces will be edited to include valuable traits that emerged via systematic breeding of the 20th Century.

The edited landraces will contain genes that make wheat cultivars semi-dwarfed, so they stand firmer in the field; red grained, because red grains inhibit early sprouting in a UK climate; and hard textured for better milling.

“Put all these traits together in a landrace and you have a package which is UK wheat: modern wheat pedigrees with the landrace diversity that provides useful traits for our climate and weather just by making changes to three or four genes,” said Dr Griffiths.

This combination of modern cultivars packed with landrace diversity will allow breeders to select directly from these new modernised landraces, opening the 60% of genetic diversity which until now has been unavailable to modern breeding.

“With the knowledge and tools we have and the passing of the Precision Breeding Act in England, we can do a better job than the breeders of the 20th century. The current methods we have developed are just taking the cherries – but you cannot do this on a scale of thousands,” observed Dr Griffiths.

“Our new programme will allow breeders to take the entire organism, the modern and old blend carrying all those thousands of genes.”

WGIN carries the same spirit of international collaboration as Watkins’ project did a century ago. While he may not have lived to see the Green Revolution, climate change or the effects of intensive plant breeding and farming, Watkins predicted that one day wheats of the past would still be needed. That day has now arrived.

Wheat is the major crop of the UK. In 2003, the Wheat Genetic Improvement Network started to connect commercial plant breeding activities and publicly funded plant and crop research institutes. The overall aim is to generate pre-breeding material carrying novel traits for UK wheat breeding companies and to deliver accessible technologies. The project is hosted by Rothamsted Research and collaborators include the John Innes Centre, Bristol Genomics Facility and USA-based Arbor Biosciences. As part of Defra funding for the next five years, the John Innes Centre will deliver work package two, which will use precision breeding techniques to adapt landraces, making them accessible to the breeding industry.