Wheat and barley Legacy for Breeding Improvement

Project Aims:

The aim of the WHEALBI project is to apply genomic, genetic and agronomic approaches to improve European wheat and barley production in competitive and sustainable cropping systems. These techniques will be used to characterise the diverse genetic resources available (including old cultivars, landraces and wild species) to provide a source of new alleles for:

• crop improvement
• addressing yield tolerance to abiotic stress
• resistance to biotic stress
• grain quality
• adaptation to highly variable environmental conditions

This will be achieved in a number of ways including:

• Next-generation sequencing of the wide genetic diversity in wheat and barley germplasm.
• Evaluation of a range of life history and adaptive traits by both field experiments and a state-of-the-art precision phenotyping platform.
• Development of pre-breeding tools and approaches to optimise the efficiency of allele transfer from unadapted germplasm into elite breeding lines.
• Developing new ideotypes and crop management systems to reconcile productivity and environmental sustainability.
• Making the research outputs directly applicable for breeders.

ORC's Role:

ORC will lead a task to identify wheat and barley ideotypes with enhanced performance under organic husbandry. We will work in close conjunction with NIAB, who will be conducting similar work under different tillage regimes.

Current progress highlights:

Read article by Ambrogio Costanzo in ORC Bulletin No.125 (Summer 2018) An ideotype for organic wheat – is it possible?

Read the press release from INRA announcing the project here

Project leader and partners:

LEADER – Institut National De La Recherche Agronomique (INRA, France)

• The James Hutton Institute (UK)
• Leibniz – Institut Fuer Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (IPK, Germany)
• Stichting Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek (DLO, Netherlands)
• Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia Agrartudomanyi Kutatokozpont (MTA ATK, Hungary)
• Consiglio per la Ricerca e la Sperimentazione in Agricoltura (CRA, Italy)
• The Genome Analysis Centre (UK)
• Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Gesundheit und Umwelt Gmbh (HMGU, Germany)
• University of Haifa (Israel)
• Parco Tecnologico Padano S.R.L. (Italy)
• National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB, UK)
• Universitaet Zuerich (UZH, Switzerland)
• KWS (UK)
• Societa Italiana Sementi Spa (SIS, Italy)
• INRA Transfert S.A. (France)
• Arcadia International (Belgium)
• The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI, Israel)

Previous Relevant Work:

• Coordinating organic plant breeding activities for diversity
• Strategies for Organic and Low-input Integrated Breeding and Management
• Wheat Breeding LINK