Quest for wheat's Holy Grail

摘要

DROUGHT tolerance - it's the Holy Grail for wheat breeders and grain growers alike. The promise that a new variety could survive the ravages of Australia's notorious droughts and still deliver profitable yields has excited the imagination of every farmer across the country for generations, and yet it is still tantalisingly out of reach. Such is the nature of the quest that progress is slow, a journey of small steps towards a milestone that is still at least a decade away. "Thinking that we're going to find a single gene that is going to be able to produce 20 per cent more yield under drought is just not realistic," says Dr Ryan Whitford from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) located at the University of Adelaide.