PRO-WILD

PRO-WILD is a project that aims to protect and promote wild relatives of wheat, sugar beet, and oilseed rape, harnessing their valuable traits to improve nutritional quality and resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses. It involves 19 partners from 11 countries and is co-funded by the EU, UK and Switzerland.

Our Germplasm Resources team specialises in ex-situ cereal and legume crop gene-pool conservation and its delivery to end users, and Dr Noam Chayut, Germplasm Resource Unit Manager, is leading PRO-WILD work package two for ex-situ conservation. We will also participate in pre-breeding activities as part of work package three for exploiting crop wild relatives (CWRs) to increase crop diversity.

In work package two, the CWR’s diversity will be compartmentalised to ensure it is amenable for reproducible genomics. Additionally, deep characterisation of diverse crop wild relative panels will be carried out in agricultural field environments, with their performance under biotic-stress compared to that of their related crops.

As part of work package three, PRO-WILD develops pre-breeding material by evaluating modern crop lines containing introgressed ‘wild genomic regions’.

The Germplasm Resources contributed by us to the PRO-WILD project include globally distributed wheat wild relatives and introgressed germplasm, from the Designing Future Wheat UKRI-BBSRC cross institute programme.