Meiotic-gene Modification to Improve Recombination in bread wheat

Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) improvement is a necessity to face the challenge of feeding the world population in the context of a sustainable agriculture using less fertilizers, pesticides and water and taking into account global warming. A strategy to overcome this challenge is to better manage and exploit the extensive and underexploited cereal genetic resources. Introduction of original alleles or genes occurs through meiotic recombination (or crossover), a highly conserved process at the heart of the life cycle and common to most sexual eukaryotes. A major bottleneck in wheat comes from variation of crossover rates in different regions of the genome in which 90% of crossovers occur in only 40% of the genome - with at least 30% of wheat genes lying in recombination poor regions. There is therefore a need to improve both crossover rate and crossover location to develop new and resilient wheat varieties. In this project, we propose to knock-out and overexpress key meiotic genes in wheat. We will evaluate the recombination phenotype using a combination of cytogenetic, genetic and genomic approaches to determine if homologous and homoeologous recombination are different in the knock-out and over-expressing lines.