| Summary: | Wheat is a staple food source across the globe. To cope with the increasing problems of global food security, higher yielding, stress tolerant wheat cultivars are necessary. This thesis describes a method of introgressing rye chromatin into wheat to make beneficial rye traits available in wheat germplasm and thus to facilitate the use of rye traits in the breeding of elite wheat cultivars.
A non-specific ‘shotgun’ method of incorporating wheat chromatin has been used and has successfully introgressed the whole rye genome into a wheat background. The Pairing homologue one locus, Ph1, is known to control homologous pairing in wheat and thus deletion mutants of Ph1 have been used to attempt to force recombination between wheat and rye. The amount of recombination between wheat and rye was lower than expected indicating a further barrier inhibiting recombination between wheat and rye.
The introgression lines produced have been genotyped using a combination of genomic in situ hybridisation (GISH) and two single nucleotides polymorphism (SNP) based methods, i.e. the Axiom® 35K SNP wild relative array and a selection of KASP markers). Genotyping has enabled the identification and tracking of introgressions through successive generations of a crossing programme and has shown a range of novel introgression lines covering the whole rye genome. Using the SNP genotyping it was possible to produce a bin map of rye and compare this map to wheat, which has confirmed several structural changes in rye in comparison to wheat.
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