CIMMYT

The John Innes Centre has a long-standing partnership with CIMMYT – a cutting edge, non-profit, international organization that leads efforts to improve the quantity, quality, and dependability of globally significant crops, including wheat and maize through applied agricultural science in the global south.

Over many decades our shared priorities has led to joint research achievements to harness and apply cutting edge approaches to wheat improvement, furthering the global effort to develop the future of wheat.

Our relationship was formalised in 2021 with the announcement of a strategic collaboration on wheat research. With researchers and partners based around the world, CIMMYT is ideally positioned to ensure our research discoveries have the greatest impact.

Wheat is a cornerstone of the human diet that provides 20% of all calories and protein consumed worldwide. However, this critical staple is under threat by climate change-related drought and heat as well as increased frequency and spread of pest and disease outbreaks.

Together we work in partnership to address these challenges, with a focus on the following key areas:

  • Developing and deploying new molecular markers for yield, resilience and nutritional traits in wheat to facilitate deploying genomic breeding approaches using data on the plant’s genetic makeup to improve breeding speed and accuracy.
  • Generating, sharing and exploiting the diversity of wheat genetic material produced during crossing and identified in seed banks.
  • Pursuing new technologies and approaches that increase breeding efficiency to introduce improved traits into new wheat varieties.
  • Developing improved technologies for rapid disease diagnostics and surveillance.
  • Training the next-generation of wheat scientists.

Current joint projects include the development and deployment of the award-winning Mobile And Real-time PLant disEase (MARPLE) diagnostics system for the wheat rusts across East Africa and South Asia, the UK-CGIAR Centre for Crop genetic improvement for future climate resilience, and close collaborations with the UKRI-BBSRC funded Delivering Sustainable Wheat institute strategic programme.