Researchers from China and Italy uncover natural variation in wild emmer wheat for broad-spectrum disease resistance

Bread wheat is one of the most important staple crops for millions of people and is apparently the largest cultivated and traded cereal worldwide. Bread wheat is a hexaploid species with three subgenomes (2n = 6x = 42, AABBDD) that has undergone two separate allopolyploidization and domestication events.Due to the bottleneck effects, modern wheat suffers from extremely low genetic diversity, which has led to genetic erosion and increased susceptibility and vulnerability to environmental stresses, pests, and diseases. Wild emmer wheat, Triticum dicoccoides, (2n = 4x = 28, AABB), is the direct wild ancestor of both durum and bread wheat, providing novel natural variation for modern wheat improvement.Researchers from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have made progress in cloning a broad-spectrum powdery mildew resistance gene, Pm36, encoding a novel tandem kinase with a transmembrane domain (WTK7-TM) originating from wild ...