Webinar: Breeding: Why we need to start all over again

Outline

The humble wheat grain was central to the birth of civilisation and, together with rice and maize, continues as a global staple on which humanity depends. The statistics which support these statements are worth careful consideration. In the season 2023-24 global wheat production was almost 785 million tonnes. Production steadily increases, most years are a new record, perfectly tracking global population increase which is predicted to peak in 2050 with no new land available to expand production. Can wheat continue to deliver for us until then?

This depends on the success of plant breeders who made possible the increases achieved so far. From the late nineteenth century a select and quite random group of unimproved landraces were sampled from limited geographical ranges and became the founders of modern breeding programmes. We rely on the genetic gains delivered by reshuffling their genomes to this day!

By reading the genetic code of global wheat landrace collection, assembled by AE Watkins in the early twentieth century an international team of researchers has shown that the foundations of modern wheat are simply too narrow and that most of the genetic diversity present in landraces has been unused in systematic breeding.

Taking into account the existential challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, declining soil health, and dietary crisis on top of our absolute need for food security I argue we need to revisit the origins of breeding and start again, enabled by the revolutionary technologies that underpin precision breeding.

References

• Cheng S, Feng C, Wingen LU, et al. Harnessing landrace diversity empowers wheat breeding. Nature, 632(2026), 823-831. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07682-9
• Sigalas, P.P., Shewry, P.R., Riche, A. et al. Improving wheat grain composition for human health by constructing a QTL atlas for essential minerals. Commun Biol 7, 1001 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-06692-7 
• Maria C. Hernandez-Soriano, Frederick J. Warren, Falk Hildebrand, Luzie U. Wingen, Anthony J. Miller, Simon Griffiths. Unearthing the rhizosphere microbiome recruited by ancestral bread wheat landraces. bioRxiv 2025.05.08.652585. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.05.08.652585

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