Dr. Simon Griffiths from the John Innes Centre is the winner of the 2024 RASE Science & Technology Award, which promotes the outstanding research and innovation that is enabling transformative change with the agri-food sector.
Simon’s research explores genetic diversity in wheat with the aim of building resilience to climate change, resistance to disease and improving productivity. The following case study provides insight into how Simon and his team have unlocked the genetic diversity contained within the A.E. Watkins collection, which is now being used in the development of new wheat varieties to improve nitrogen use efficiency, yield and nutritional content.
What is the A.E. Watkins collection?
The A.E. Watkins collection is a diverse collection of wheat landraces, which has preserved genetic material of wheat from around the world. It was collected in the 1920s by Arthur Ernest Watkins, a botanist who was based at Cambridge University, then later at the Plant Breeding Institute.
Watkins collected the samples by writing to British embassies, consulates and garrisons all over the world, requesting they go to the local market for some wheat. Letters containing these requests can now be found in the archives at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. In the letters, he wrote that breeding of wheat, which began around the same time, was displacing the wheat landraces, which was why he undertook the task of preserving landraces from all over the world.
Watkin’s move from Cambridge University to the Plant Breeding Institute proved to be a key decision for the longevity of the collection, as at the Plant Breeding Institute the material was multiplied, which is what makes it so useful now, as the seed was kept alive.
The original collection contained approximately 10,000 landraces, but unfortunately maintenance of the material lapsed during the second world war, and the current collection contains 827 wheat landraces from 32 countries.
Landraces vs. varieties
Landrace wheat is genetically diverse and locally adapted, with materials passed from generation to generation and exchanged with neighbours over thousands of years. Varieties are the lines bred by plant breeders. Plant breeders cross the best with the best, to select the best, highest yielding plants for cultivation.
Modern breeding began around 100 years ago. Breeders could not sample all the landraces using genetics and genomics when they began breeding. The research using the Watkins collection has shown that the ‘family tree’ of modern wheat varieties began with European landraces, meaning genetic material from landraces from other parts of the world was never included.
When you look at landraces that were not used in modern breeding, it is possible to find new genes for yield, disease resistance, nutrient content and for biological nitrification inhibition, which improves nitrogen fertiliser use efficiency. However, growing a landrace is not a sustainable solution, as they tend to be low yielding, tall and prone to falling over and succumb easily to disease. It is therefore necessary to unlock the genetic material behind the traits that can improve modern lines of wheat.
Harnessing genetic potential from landraces
Simon and his team at the John Innes Centre, in collaboration with a research group at the Agricultural Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, sequenced the entire surviving Watkins collection of landraces.
Given that wheat has a genome which is six times bigger than the human genome, this was a huge undertaking. It took many years just to get the first sequence of wheat, for this project 1,200 genomes were sequenced.
They found that genetics from just two of the seven ancestral groups of landraces found in the collection are to be found in modern varieties of wheat, meaning 60% of the genetic diversity within the Watkins collection is a previously untapped resource.
Families from the Watkins collection were crossed with modern wheat, to make a collection of 12,000 lines of wheat that are now stored in the Germplasm Resource Unit at the John Innes Centre. These can then be screened for traits that are of interest to farmers – such as yield or disease resistance – to understand where a gene that controls a specific characteristic is located on a chromosome. Together with a large consortium including Rothamsted, University of Bristol, Earlham Institute, University of Nottingham, University of Leeds and all of the UKs major commercial wheat breeders the team led by Simon applied these methods en masse. This allowed the UK to deliver a step change in our understanding of wheat genetics.
With this information, breeders can take modern wheat, cross with the landrace and select and select just for the gene of interest. Depending on the trait associated with the selected gene, this can provide increased disease resistance, higher yields, improved nutritional quality or reduced time from drilling to maturity, which enables adaption to climate change.
Two of the varieties on the most recent variety list had Watkins pedigree in them, and more can be expected in future years as breeding companies continue to make use of the genetics from the collection.
Simon and his team have also developed a breeder’s toolkit, which provides wheat breeders with a set of online resources and enables other scientists and breeders access to the resources from the Watkins collection. In 2015, Simon founded the ‘Breeders Toolkit Committee’ that brings together the research community and wheat breeders which is vital for enhancing UK agricultural sustainability.
Continued wheat research
Watkins diversity is now being used for much of the wheat research funded in the new Delivering Sustainable Wheat Cross-Institute programme, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and led by Simon.
The aim of this programme is to cultivate a sustainable supply of nutritious wheat for a carbon-efficient farming future. The research strives to create wheat that is climate resilient, nitrogen fertiliser efficient, carbon sequestering, resistant to diseases (even new ones), benefitting from precise plant protection products and enriched with essential minerals for human nutrition such as zinc, iron, calcium and magnesium and also dietary fibre.
As the crop which provides 20% of the calories consumed by people globally, improved genetics in wheat that enable it to be more nutritious, resistant to disease and resilient to a changing climate will have a big impact on sustainable food production and nutrition security all over the world. The research which uncovered genetics from the landraces in the Watkins collection has opened doors for future wheat production, the full impact of which will only be knowable in years to come.
About the sponsor
Future Biogas is one of the largest producers of green gas in the UK and is pioneering the UK’s first unsubsidised biomethane project, ‘Project Carbon Harvest’.
Future Biogas currently procures over half a million tonnes a year of a variety of bioenergy crops through long-term partnerships with our growers across the East of England. Project Carbon Harvest will help support our growers through the agricultural transition, adopting more sustainable farming practices and encouraging custodianship of UK soils.
