Delphine Fleury
Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, Australia
Title: Progress in positional cloning of drought tolerance QTL in wheat using genomics resources.
Biography
Biography: Delphine Fleury
Abstract
Climate change is predicted to lead to more episodes of drought and heat and requires the breeding of tolerant cultivars able to sustain production under stress. The discovery and use of new dwarfing and maturity alleles were major advances in wheat breeding that led to the high yielding varieties of the Green revolution of the 1960s. Over the past decade yield improvement has slowed to about 1% increase per year. A way to improve the drought tolerance of crops varieties is to discover new genes and alleles that allow plants to continue to grow and yield grain under water limited conditions. Although many quantitative trait loci (QTL) have been identified in wheat few have been deployed in breeding programmes. Over ten years program, the ACPFG has cumulated QTL information on three genetic populations for yield, agronomical, physiological and morphological traits in various locations in Australia, India and Mexico. Genomic resources have tremendously increased in the last years, which enable us making progress in fine mapping and positional cloning of drought tolerance QTL. One of our targets is qDHY.3BL, a QTL that increases yield and yield components in hot and dry climates. qDHY.3BL was fine mapped using the cv Chinese Spring reference sequence of chromosome 3B and whole genome shotgun sequences of Australian parental lines. We also identified haplotypes at the QTL interval from a diverse wheat panel combining 800 worldwide accessions and studied their distribution among these accessions.