United Kingdom
October 2009

Source: WGIN stakeholder newsletter - October 2009

Background

The UK government is committed to more sustainable agriculture but this vision is facing an ever expanding range of environmental, energy and climate change challenges. Wheat is grown on a larger area and is more valuable than any other arable crop in the UK. Established in 2003, the Wheat Genetic Improvement Network (WGIN) arose directly from a realisation in the early 2000s that over the preceding two decades there had been a widening disconnection between commercial plant breeding activities and publicly funded plant and crop research. The overall aim of WGIN is to generate pre-breeding material carrying novel traits for the UK breeding companies and to deliver accessible technologies, thereby ensuring the means are available to produce new, improved varieties. An integrated scientific 'core' which combines underpinning work on molecular markers, genetic and genomic research, together with novel trait identification, are being pursued to achieve this goal. The programme is managed by a team including representatives of the key UK research groups and breeders. They ensure the programme and its outputs are communicated to the wider scientific and end user communities, via a web site, a stakeholder forum, focused meetings and peer reviewed publications. WGIN liaises with equivalent operations overseas to ensure the programme is internationally competitive.

The initial WGIN project ran for five years (2003-2008) and achieved considerable scientific success. In addition, the sustained networking activities and the availability of datasets generated by the project led to the establishment of many new wheat genetic improvement projects, including some funded jointly by the public sector and industry. Those funded by early 2008 were summarised in the May 2008 Stakeholders Newsletter and since then two additional projects have been agreed. There is no doubt that WGIN has a direct and significant impact on re-establishing the relationship between commercial plant breeding activities and public funded plant and crop research. However significant hurdles remain which currently prevent commercial implementation of much new research which should help to reduce the energy requirement and environmental impact of the UK wheat crop.

This project

The new WGIN Core Project started in 2008 to provide genetic and molecular resources for research in other defra projects and for a wide range of wheat research projects in the UK. The resources under development include wheat genetic stocks, mapping populations, molecular markers and marker technologies, trait identification and evaluation, genomics and bioinformatics. The initially funded partners are the John Innes Centre, Rothamsted Research and The University of Nottingham but support has been allocated for sub-contracted projects which will be awarded in open competition during 2009 (see website for details on the project – www.wgin.org.uk).

Full newsletter: http://www.wgin.org.uk/stakeholders/WGINNLOct2009.pdf

Website: http://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-environment-food-rural-affairs

Published: November 3, 2009