Investment

In Australia, optimising wheat yields is a balancing act between conditions that are either too cold or too hot and dry. Stabilising productivity of wheat crops in these conditions requires wheat varieties that are more tolerant to abiotic stress conditions. However, progressing breeding for wheat varieties with higher abiotic stress resilience is difficult in the field. In earlier work progress had been made in establishing screening methods (including pollen fertility and shading sensitivity) for drought tolerance under controlled environment conditions. Using these screens to measure the maintenance of pollen fertility and grain number, the current project aims to: (i) Identify flanking markers for two tolerance loci-of-interest that overlap between drought and shading stress; (ii) Refine the interval between the flanking markers of these tolerance loci in order to identify more closely-linked markers that can be used in marker-assisted breeding; (iii) Evaluated lines containing tolerance loci under field conditions for drought tolerance. This material will also be tested for heat and cold/frost tolerance; (iv) Make available information of breeding lines and flanking markers to breeders for introgression into elite breeding lines.The outcome of the project will be tools and a strategy to produce wheat varieties that are better able to maintain grain yield under terminal drought conditions and potentially other stress conditions.