Wheat breeders beat the heat

August 31, 2010 at 11:04 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Wheat mapping population sown in July, exposing plants to extreme temperature from sowing to maturity. Left to right: Dr Francis Ogbonnaya, wheat breeder; Dr Maarten van Ginkel, DDG-Research; and Ms Awatif Farag Alla, PhD student from the University of Khartoum

This year has been unusually hot: of the 123 days from 1 May to 31 August, two-thirds had higher maximum temperature than the long term average. In July, temperatures exceeded 46˚C on some days. In August, maximum temperatures exceeded 40˚C almost every day. Such temperature spikes are expected to become more serious in dry areas as a result of climate change, reducing crop yields and threatening food security.
ICARDA’s wheat breeding program is developing genotypes that can give reasonable yields even in heat-stressed environments. Ms Awatif Farag Alla, from Juba University, Sudan, is researching her PhD on this subject. She is registered with the University of Khartoum, and her ICARDA co-supervisors are Dr Francis Ogbonnaya and Dr Osman Abdalla. She is characterizing heat tolerance using a recombinant inbred mapping population grown in environments prone to extreme temperatures. Experiments are being conducted for the second season, at ICARDA’s Tel Hadya station, and ARC farms in Wad Medani (central Sudan) and Dongola (northern Sudan). Trials are sown at different dates, so that plants experience heat stress at different stages of development . The aim is to identify traits underpinning heat adaptation in a range of production environments and to identify genomic regions associated with such traits. This knowledge will help in the breeding of heat-tolerant wheat varieties to mitigate the impact of climate change on yield and quality.