Full wheat genome within reach, at little cost

PARIS - The head of a body set up by the G20 economic powers to help avert food crises urged governments on Tuesday to fund a map of wheat's unusually complex genetic code to help boost crop yields and feed growing world demand.

 

Five times bigger than the human genome, the mysteries of the world's most widely sown crop could be fully sequenced by late 2016 with financing of just $20 million, said Helene Lucas, coordinator of the Wheat Initiative, which meets in Paris on Wednesday to discuss the plan to counter stagnant wheat yields.

 

"We have reached a plateau in output, we now have to make a further step to produce more, produce better, by using all the tools available to us," Lucas, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), told Reuters.

 

"If we pool our financing now we can achieve a high-quality sequencing at the end of 2016 that will be available to everyone," she said in an interview, noting that this would mean her international agency's 14 state-funded members putting up a modest $1.4 million each over three years. "That's peanuts."

 

Flagging growth in harvest yields of wheat has raised concern countries will not be able to achieve the 60-percent rise in output by 2050 that the United Nations says is needed to meet rising demand from a growing population and a shift in appetites toward Western-style bread, cakes and biscuits.

 

The G20, grouping leaders of old and new industrial powers, set up the Wheat Initiative in 2011, concerned that shortages and swings in prices were damaging the world economy.

 

Completely decoding the wheat genome should give scientists a basis to create varieties of wheat better able to withstand disease or a harsh climate, Lucas said. That could involve modifying genes or developing new strains in traditional ways.

 

COMPLEX GENES

 

Lack of funding has held up international research efforts to map the wheat genome, which have also been marked by rivalry among scientific teams and the publication of partial results.

 

"What has been produced by a certain number of teams so far are pieces of partial sequencing, not necessarily in the right order, either of wheat or species close to wheat," Lucas said. "It's useful but not a full and high-quality sequence of wheat."

 

One out of 21 chromosomes of the grain has been fully mapped in a project led by INRA due to be published soon - chromosome 3B. That alone is three times the size of the rice genome.

 

Average annual growth in wheat yields worldwide slowed to 1.1 percent in 2001-2010. The U.N. food agency says that needs to rebound to 1.6 percent to provide sufficient wheat by 2050.

 

Yet research investment in wheat is only a quarter of what it has been in maize, a crop private businesses find easier and more profitable to manipulate.

 

Unlike maize or soybeans, genetically modified organism (GMO) wheat is not in production although there are some trials. But the genetic research proposed would also help improve yields through traditional plant-breeding techniques, Lucas said.

 

Noting how a warmer climate was blamed for a lack of yield gains in France, a major wheat producer, she said that the genome map could help produce ways to bring forward the plant's flowering cycle to cooler weeks earlier in the year.

 

Gene sequencing, however, was not the answer to all problems - wheat yields in Africa and other developing regions could be raised simply through better farming: "For Africa, GMOs are not a priority, it is rather agronomy," Lucas said.

 

"There is no one magic solution for all."  — Reuters