Genomics of Wild Relatives and Alien Introgressions

Rey, Elodie and Molnár, István and Doležel, Jaroslav (2015) Genomics of Wild Relatives and Alien Introgressions. In: Alien Introgression in Wheat. Springer International Publishing Switzerland, pp. 347-381.

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Abstract

Alien introgression breeding is an attractive approach to recover genetic variation that was lost during wheat domestication and breeding. New alleles and genes may be introduced from wild relatives from the tribe Triticeae, which exhibit large genetic variation and many potentially useful traits. Although a range of wheat–alien introgression lines has been developed, apart from the 1BL.1RS translocation, only a few commercial wheat cultivars benefitted from alien introgression. This is a consequence of poor knowledge of genome structure of wild donors, limited ability to control chromosome behavior during meiosis in interspecific hybrids and introgression lines, difficulties in eliminating unwanted chromatin transferred simultaneously with genes of interest, as well as a lack of tools permitting large-scale production and characterization of introgression lines. Recent advances in molecular and flow cytogenetics and genomics are bound to change the situation. New insights into the meiotic recombination raise the hopes for the ability to control its frequency and distribution. The progress in comparative genome analysis provides clues about the genome collinearity between wild species and wheat, making it possible to assess chances for chromosome recombination and predict its outcomes. Genomics tools enable massive and high-resolution screening of hybrids and their progenies and characterize their genomes, including the development of markers linked to traits of interest. Until recently, little attention has been paid to the function of introgressed genes and their interaction with the host genome. However, also this has been changing and all these achievements make the breeding of improved wheat cultivars using wild germplasm a realistic goal.

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