DFW Toolkit
The aim of Designing Future Wheat (DFW) Programme is to deliver new useful genetic variation and knowledge to breeding. Specifically, DFW Work Package 3 will accelerate the discovery and deployment of genes and alleles of high value for breeding.
Tangible DFW WP3 outputs for this purpose are referred to as ‘toolkits’, one composed of pre-breeding germplasm and the other the molecular markers needed to exploit that germplasm.
New genes, alleles and markers are validated and tested for their value in breeding. This gene discovery funnel produces packages of traits with molecular markers assembled into the two toolkits. Work Package 3 channels new genes and alleles based on the discoveries of DFW and previous wheat programme outputs, into commercial wheat breeding.
DFW pre-breeding germplasm, the DFW germplasm toolkit, is developed and handled in a collaboration between DFW WP3 and the Germplasm Resource Unit (GRU). The new pre-breeding germplasm includes near isogenic lines (NILs) from wheat diversity sources and equivalent material.
DFW Academic Toolkit Field Trials
To identify particularly promising germplasm for breeding, which will then be trialed in multi-site trials at commercial breeders, academic institutions run larger trials, the DFW Academic Toolkit (TK) trials. The trialled DFW toolkit captures diversity from- wheat landraces (developed at JIC) (see below)
- wheat synthetics (developed at NIAB)
- wheat wild relative introgression (developed at the University of Nottingham).
Trait Data
Phenotypic data from DFW-TK field trials is available as spread sheets:
DFW Landrace Toolkit at JIC: NIL pairs developed by MAS for QTL regions
The main strategy of the Simon Griffith's group at JIC is to capture diversity from the
AE Watkins wheat landrace collection.
Selected QTL regions are introgressed by Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) into UK reference cultivar 'Paragon', which is also the common parent of the NAM panel.
Back-crossing is started from a RIL line of the NAM panel.
Final BC2F2 NILs are BC3 equivalents and have approx. 87% Paragon background.
Performance of BC2F2 NIL pairs, which were selected by MAS to have opposing parental alleles in the targeted QTL region,
is compared in DFW toolkit field trials (see above).
NILs were genotyped with the 35k Bread Wheat Axiom Chip and the markers scores arranged along the whole genome assembly.
The graphical genotypes can be inspected on the following webpages:
- ParagonxWatkins NIL Set I
- ParagonxWatkins NIL Set II
- ParagonxWatkins and others NIL Set 3
- ParagonxWatkins and others NIL Set 4+5
- ParagonxWatkins and others NIL Set 6
DFW Breeders' Diversity Toolkit
A selection of highly performing NIL pairs, or similar, tested in multi-environment trials. This resource has a dedicated page here
