Breeding Procedure Accelerates Winter Wheat Development

Scientists at South Dakota State University (SDSU) implements an innovative plant breeding technique to lessen the time needed to produce winter wheat varieties for farmers in the Prarie Pothole Region of North America.

To produce double-haploid plants, breeders are pollinating wheat plants with corn. The offspring is not genetically modified because the corn chromosomes are transferred by pollination and are biologically eliminated during development of the wheat plants. Thus, the corn chromosomes just act as placeholders that will be replaced by the wheat plant's own chromosomes during the production of double-haploids.

"I would say in the traditional way, on average, we're probably talking 10 to 12 years from the initial cross to the final release of the variety. It could even be longer than that," said Bill Berzonsky, leader of SDSU's winter wheat breeding project. "With this technique, my estimation is that it probably cuts off maybe one to two years from the process. You'd think it would cut off a lot more than that but we still need to test the doubled-haploid lines extensively in the field."

The complete story is available at http://www.sdstate.edu/news/featurestories/wheat-breeding.cfm.