Harnessing landrace diversity empowers wheat breeding.

ABSTRACT: Harnessing genetic diversity in major staple crops through the development of new breeding capabilities is essential to ensure food security¹. Here we examined the genetic and phenotypic diversity of the A. E. Watkins landrace collection² of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), a major global cereal, by whole-genome re-sequencing of 827 Watkins landraces and 208 modern cultivars and in-depth field evaluation spanning a decade. We found that modern cultivars are derived from two of the seven ancestral groups of wheat and maintain very long-range haplotype integrity. The remaining five groups represent untapped genetic sources, providing access to landrace-specific alleles and haplotypes for breeding. Linkage disequilibrium-based haplotypes and association genetics analyses

SUBMITTER: Cheng S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11338829 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature