It had seemed impossible to crack the ice ceiling in wheat, but victory may finally be within reach
Winter wheat that can survive even the harshest winters? Spring wheat that’s just as tolerant? For western Canadian farmers, it sounds almost too good to be true, with cold tolerant wheat lines that could protect quality markets and guard against crop failure.
Now researchers at the University of California-Davis have found the key that may unlock the puzzle. They’ve identified the genes responsible for determining frost tolerance in wheat.
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The study, published in the March 2008 edition of the Plant Molecular Biology Journal, will lead to a better understanding of winterkill, which would be a boon to winter wheat growers, especially on the frigid Canadian Prairies.
The study shows what wheat breeders have speculated about for many years. Frost tolerance is indeed a complex trait in wheat, controlled by several genes.
The study also suggest that the genes responsible for differences in frost tolerance are gene regulators. In non-scientific language, we might call them “captain genes” because their role is to turn on the whole team of genes that are required to acclimate the plants to coming frost.
A key finding of the new research is that these regulatory or captain genes start working a whole lot earlier in frost-tolerant wheat than in more susceptible varieties, hopping into action at a mild 11 to 15 degrees Celsius.
Many plant species, including winter wheat, must undergo a prolonged period of cold weather before they will flower. It’s a process known as vernalization. In evolutionary terms, vernalization helps the plant develop the seed earlier in the season, at an environmentally favourable time. The danger, however, is that if temperatures are too cold, the crop will be damaged by winterkill, so it doesn’t set any seed at all, or the plant can be hit in the spring, with the seed freezing so that it loses both on germination and on nutritional quality.
To help protect themselves against that frost risk, wheat plants have developed a genetic switch, explains Jorge Dubcovsky, a wheat breeder, geneticist, and professor of plant science at the University of California-Davis.
