Niab, the UK crop science organisation, will lead a new international programme meant to get promising wheat research into commercial breeding, and so into farmers' fields, faster. The three-year project, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), starts in October 2026 and is the first major project under the second phase of the International Wheat Yield Partnership (IWYP), which brings together research bodies, public funders and private breeders.
Led by Dr Phil Howell, Niab's crop improvement research lead, the project will introduce and combine novel traits in elite European winter wheat backgrounds. The resulting advanced pre-breeding lines will be tested at breeder trial sites across the UK and Europe. Niab will work with eight commercial wheat breeding companies and with IWYP hubs at CIMMYT in Mexico, Kansas State University and the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
Howell said finding genes and traits is only the start, and that promising research too often fails to become gains on farms. The project, he said, builds "a rapid route from promising scientific discoveries to advanced pre-breeding material in adapted, high-yielding variety backgrounds", tested across European environments with breeders to see which traits matter most to them.
It builds on Niab's European Winter Wheat Hub, set up in 2020, which used marker-assisted breeding to move traits from unadapted sources into elite European varieties and produced hundreds of pre-breeding lines for breeders to evaluate. The new programme will fund more pre-breeding, phenotyping and field testing at Niab and at breeder sites in the UK, France, Germany and Denmark.
Professor Richard Flavell, chair of IWYP's Scientific and Impact Executive Board, said Niab will act as the European hub for IWYP's translational research and share knowledge and technology with its other hubs. Formally titled "IWYP v2.0, a translational hub for international wheat pre-breeding and trait validation", the project is part of a co-ordinated international "Virtual Super Hub" for wheat improvement.
Photo: Bill Boaden / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Source: Seed World Europe
Comments
(0)