The modern wheat crop has been eroded by hybridizations and breeding, leaving the crop vulnerable to pests and disease. With a global dependance on wheat and a rapidly increasing population, it is crucial that we engineer more sustainable ways of crop cultivation that don’t require pesticides.
The wild grassy relatives to the modern wheat crop are far more resilient to pests and disease. We are mining these grasses for their resistance genes and studying their evolution and mechanism from the molecular to the population scale.
Our aim is to engineer the resistance of wild wheat into elite wheat cultivars to create a crop which is protected by genetics, without the need for pesticides.
