An international team of researchers has made a breakthrough that could make wheat more resistant to the changing climate and plant diseases, which would reduce threats to the global food supply. The research was published in Nature.
According to Phys.org, scientists from the Centre for Crop and Food Innovation (CCFI) at Murdoch University in Australia, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), and China Agriculture University (CAU) spent four years working on the project.
Wheat production across the globe has been negatively affected by extreme weather in recent years. In 2023, unusually heavy rains impacted millions of tons of wheat in China, while at the same time, drought reduced yields by millions of bushels in Kansas, the top wheat producer in the U.S.
Then there's the issue of disease.
A recent study concluded that as the world continues to get warmer, instances of wheat blast — a fungal disease that threatens wheat crops — will continue to rise.
According to the study, wheat blast currently threatens about 16 million acres of cropland, and that will increase to 33 million acres by 2050 if the current trend continues. That would cut global wheat production by 13%, according to the study.
But such worries could soon be a thing of the past. The team successfully assembled 17 strains of wheat at the genetic level, which allowed them to identify 250,000 structural variations in the genetic sequences of the wheat that regulate environmental adaptation, resistance to disease, and dietary preferences.
The researchers were also able to pinpoint the genes responsible for resistance to new diseases and environmental adaptation. All of this is to say that scientists might soon be able to create variations of wheat made specifically to survive in certain environments and be less susceptible to disease.
But the scientists who made this breakthrough aren't the only ones who have been looking to alter wheat on a genetic level to better handle extreme weather, particularly droughts.
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A company in Argentina genetically engineered wheat to tolerate drought, while scientists in the U.S. at UC Davis have discovered a way to manipulate wheat genes to make the roots grow longer so they can access water during drought conditions.
All of this should eventually lead to greater production of one of the most versatile crops in the world and help in the fight against food insecurity, which affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
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