MasAgro

Trigo para Mexico (previously known as MasAgro-Trigo) (SADER, Mexico). Beginning in 2011, this project has sponsored translational research and breeding to boost wheat yield under diverse scenarios including heat and drought stress. Activities have included designing conceptual models of climate resilient wheat genotypes, physiological characterization of wheat genetic resources, development of high throughput screening protocols, strategic crossing to develop novel genetically diverse advanced lines, distribution of the pre-breeding nursery ‘Stress Adaptive Trait Yield Nursery’ (SATYN) to around 100 international sites annually, and capacity building of young wheat scientists working in climate challenged regions, including PhD students.

Maiz y Trigo para Mexico (previously known as MasAgro-Biodiversidad) (SADER, Mexico). In the same timeframe as Trigo para Mexico, above, the Maiz y Trigo para Mexico biodiversity project has used genomic and phenomic technologies to characterize genetic resources in the World Wheat Collection. Nearly 80,000 accessions spanning numerous types of germplasm were genotyped using high-throughput DArTseq technology (Sansaloni et al., 2020). Diversity analysis (Figure 8) revealed that little of the genetic diversity in the landraces has been used in modern breeding. 60,000 diverse lines were screened under heat and drought stress in the Sonoran Desert. The information has been used to identify parents for strategic crosses in pre-breeding and to develop experimental research panels such as the Bread Wheat Diversity Panel and the Elite Diversity Panel. (See also https://seedsofdiscovery.org/catalogue/)

Figure 8: Diversity analysis of domesticated hexaploid accessions (from Sansaloni et al., 2020) Reprinted under license CC-BY.