GM Wheat?

 Wheat now provides 20% of the calories consumed by humans every day, but its production is under threat, thanks to global warming. Two main forms of wheat are grown in farms: pasta wheat and bread wheat. Together they play a crucial role in the diets of around 4.5 billion people. 2.5 billion in 89 countries are dependent on wheat for their daily food.

The planet faces a future of increasingly severe heat waves, droughts and wildfires that could devastate harvests in future, triggering widespread famine in their wake.

 Research now being undertaken by researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich are working on a project to make wheat more resistant to heat and drought. 

“Wheat – despite its critical importance to feeding the world – has proved to be the most difficult of all the major crops to study because of the complexity and size of its genome. Hence, the importance of the search to find the gene that was the cause of this problem.” explained Professor Graham Moore, a wheat geneticist and director of the John Innes Centre.

Wild relatives have really useful characteristics – disease resistance, salt tolerance, protection against heat – attributes that you want to add to make wheat more robust and easy to grow in harsh conditions. But you couldn’t do that because this gene stopped these attributes from being assimilated.

It has taken several decades but scientists at the John Innes Centre have now succeeded in their hunt for their holy grail. They identified the key gene, labelled it Zip4.5B and have created a mutant version of it, one that allows the gene to carry out its main function – to allow wheat chromosomes to pair correctly and maintain yields – but which lacks its ability to block the creation of new variants with attributes from wild grasses.

‘Holy grail’ wheat gene discovery could feed our overheated world | Climate crisis | The Guardian