Wheat in a Hot and Dry Climate

The Wheat Hub’s research period has officially drawn to a close but please click below to view our

ONLINE SHOWCASE !!

Our Mission

Enhance productivity and secure high grain quality of wheat in the hot and dry Australian climate.

Our Goals

Develop wheat with combined heat and drought tolerance by advancing existing knowledge and technologies and transferring wheat material and knowhow to breeding programmes

Elucidate mechanisms and molecular markers for combined heat and drought tolerance by exploring genetic diversity in wheat

Identify mechanisms and genetic diversity for high yielding wheat with efficient nitrogen recycling and high grain protein.

Build human capacity in molecular breeding and providing breeders access to the latest scientific developments and technologies.

Develop and test high-throughput field phenotyping tools for Australian breeders

Signalling to stomates to improve drought resistance

Wheat Hub members Mamoru Okamoto and Larissa Chirkova formed part of the team investigating GABA signalling and how it aids in water use efficiency and drought tolerance – read their publication in Nature Communications here

Improving Nitrogen Use Efficiency in wheat – another attribute towards achieving agricultural sustainability

Wheat Hub scientists contribute to this study into nitrogen-use-efficiency and the genetic and metabolic responses to over-expression of AlaAT. Read about their discoveries here

Using near-isogenic lines to investigate drought and heat stress tolerance

Bread wheat near-isogenic lines were developed by Jessica Schmidt, a recent PhD graduate from the Wheat Hub, and used to target chromosome 6B to investigate mechanisms involved in drought and heat stress tolerance. This research…

Doubling up on abiotic stresses – exploring tolerance mechanisms in wheat

Abdel El Habti, one of the Wheat Hub’s recent PhD graduates, investigated the combined effects of drought and heat stress on plant water use, carbohydrate partitioning and spike hydraulic properties. A new publication in Frontiers…

More news

Research Areas

Program 1: Drought and heat tolerance

The most important constraint to wheat production in Australia is water scarcity. In the last decade, Australia has suffered multi-year droughts and, based on FAO statistics, yield in 2006 dropped by 46% below… Read more.

Program 2: Germplasm development for genetic diversity

Crop improvement is dependent upon genetic diversity. The rate of genetic gain in breeding programs can increase by extending the amount or nature of variation available for selection using land races and wild… Read more.

Program 3: High throughput phenotyping tools

The development of improved varieties relies on identifying the best performing entries from a breeding population. However, high-throughput phenotyping tools beyond the plot harvester are still rare (White et al., 2012) and not… Read more.

Program 4: Linkage of yield and grain nitrogen

Introduction Nitrogen (N) is an essential macro nutrient for plants and N fertilizers have to be applied in agricultural production systems to obtain high grain yield and prevent N depletion and soil degradation.… Read more.

Program 5: Genomics for breeding

Introduction Advances in genomics and high throughput technologies have the potential to transform breeding such that desired traits can be quickly sourced from wild germplasm and integrated into elite lines. By combining the… Read more.

ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub for
Wheat in a Hot and Dry Climate