Uncovering the secrets of wheat: are three genes better than one? – Dr Philippa Borrill скачать в хорошем качестве

Uncovering the secrets of wheat: are three genes better than one? – Dr Philippa Borrill

Uncovering the secrets of wheat: are three genes better than one? 🌾🧬 Dr Philippa Borrill, John Innes Centre "Billions of people around the world depend on polyploid crops such as wheat, potato, sugarcane and bananas that have complex genomes, with multiple gene copies resulting from whole genome duplication. These complex, polyploid genomes have posed barriers to the use of genetic and genomic approaches for crop improvement. In the last decade the international wheat community has developed a suite of genomic tools that now enable us to untangle the functions of these gene copies in polyploid wheat and accelerate crop breeding. Bread wheat is a hexaploid with three highly similar copies of most genes, known as homoeologs. Whether the three homoeologs have similar biological functions is currently unknown and this information will be critical for wheat improvement. I will describe how we are using computational approaches to unmask genetic redundancy between gene copies to understand their biological functions and identify target genes for wheat breeding. I will show how we can drill down into the function of individual gene copies using gene editing and mutagenesis. I will highlight how we work across scales: from examining gene expression in single cells to field-scale experiments. By integrating multiple approaches, we can rapidly advance our understanding of polyploid crop biology and deliver improved crops to the people who depend on them." Read more: https://borrilllab.com/ Speaker profile: Philippa Borrill is a plant geneticist working on bread wheat, an important staple crop for billions of people. Philippa’s research investigates how the multiple gene copies in wheat interact to influence agronomically important traits. This knowledge can be applied to improve the nutrient content of wheat alongside increasing yield. Philippa studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge obtaining her PhD from the John Innes Centre. After her PhD, as a BBSRC Anniversary Future Leader Fellow, Philippa developed a series of key resources for wheat genomics including a gene expression atlas which has been used by over 45,000 people globally. In 2018 Philippa joined the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer in Plant Biology. She returned to the John Innes Centre as a Group Leader in 2021. Philippa’s work on wheat genomics and transcriptomics has been recognised by awards such as the New Phytologist 2019 Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science and the Society for Experimental Biology 2022 Plant President’s Medal. Philippa is committed to making wheat research accessible to other scientists, industry and the general public. She has organised training workshops in wheat bioinformatics and co-developed a wheat training website. Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2024. #plantscience #genomics #polyploidy