This project demonstrates and field-assesses wheat lines designed to accumulate salt in their leaves rather than exclude salt at root level, opening up the possibility of improved water use efficiency through osmotic adjustment.
Project description:
The proposed project addresses the SA Drought Hub objective of ‘enhancing drought resilience and recovery across all farming sectors’ and National Agricultural Innovation Priority 2. ‘Australia will champion climate resilience to increase the productivity, profitability and sustainability of the agricultural sector by 2030’. It fits within Activity 2 ‘deliver demonstration sties to increase adoption of existing research’.
Drought is the most prevalent abiotic stress affecting production of wheat in Australia. Over the last three decades, there has been a significant GRDC and state investment into understanding drought tolerance (ability to maintain biomass and yield under drought conditions) and its mechanisms. As a result, researchers have identified mechanisms related to the capacity of plants to tolerate drought, the genetic variation available within breeding germplasm and diagnostic markers for genes of interest. Despite these advances, there remains strong grower interest in the development of varieties that incorporate further drought tolerance.
Objectives
To demonstrate, and field-assess wheat lines designed to accumulate salt (at 100x wheat cultivar Mace) in their leaves rather than exclude salt at root level. This accumulation mechanism opens the possibility of improved water use efficiency through osmotic adjustment. This novel germplasm is the result of ten years of sustained effort by The University of Adelaide (UoA) and SARDI researchers and represents an exciting opportunity to stabilise yield under rainfed conditions.
The project lead, Dr Yusuf Genc, worked with colleagues at UoA, SARDI and CSSSA to develop a field demonstration site to assess the germplasm for traits that contribute to stable yield, and to extend these findings to growers, consultants and breeders. We expect germplasm with advantageous traits will be taken up by plant breeding companies for further development, providing growers with expanded variety options for dry years and assisting them to reduce risk and improve mixed farming resilience.
Aims:
- To assess the potential of 460 novel fixed bread wheat lines for improved water use efficiency on constrained soil types and compare growth and yield against 24 historical and current bread wheat varieties.
- Coordinated by The Crop Science Society of South Australia (CSSSA), a society of c. 450 members, showcase the germplasm in the field to growers, consultants, and breeding companies.
Key achievements and results:
As we encountered crop establishment and pre-harvest sprouting issues in the field trial, we were unable to conduct yield analysis, hence, could not determine yield potential of novel bread wheat germplasms against historical wheats. On a positive note, we observed significant variation in spike traits (funded by SAGIT) and are currently analysing spike samples by X-Ray CT at the Plant Accelerator (University of Adelaide). We identified novel bread wheat lines with significantly higher grains per spike than commercial wheats, indicating their potential to improve wheat yields. However, it remains to be seen in future field trials how these spike traits relate to grain yield.