Walk on the Wild Side: improving breeders' access to traits from crop wild relatives.

To sustainably meet society's future food needs we will need crop varieties equipped to meet a new set of environmental challenges and emerging diseases. A powerful resource to help meet this challenge are the many beneficial traits found in landraces and wild relatives of crops. Much of this important biodiversity has been collected and is housed in repositories such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the AberInnovation Seed BioBank at Aberystwyth University but introducing these beneficial "wild traits" into crops remains a challenge, often taking many years of pre-breeding before traits can enter conventional breeding programmes.

This project addresses two of the major challenges to trait introgression - What limits introgression? And when it occurs, how do we find out what has been introgressed?

Based at the University of Aberystwyth, the student will use CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing to gain fundamental insights into the genes that limit the introgression of traits from wild crop relatives. The student will learn cutting edge plant biotechnology, molecular and cell biology and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques and work closely with plant breeders based in Aberystwyth.

The student will also spend time at Cranfield University and the Earlham Istitute, working with experts in bioinformatics to develop software that can help plant breeders and pre-breeders efficiently characterise introgressions to find out which wild gene variants have been introduced and which lines to use for future breeding programmes. This software will be put to use in collaboration with breeders at commercial partner Germinal, a plant breeding company with a base in Aberystwyth, where it will be used to characterise clover introgression lines for use in Germinal's white clover breeding programme.