Developing tools to detect late maturity a-amylase in Canadian wheat for creating germplasm resilient to environmental stress

Funding Partners: 

Alberta Grains, Manitoba Crop Alliance (MCA), Western Grains Research Foundation (WGRF)

Summary

The project aims at better understanding the impact of late maturity amylase on grain quality losses in wheat and developing an accurate and reliable predictive method to induce and measure LMA. Implementing the LMA screening methodology will provide the Canadian wheat sector with the tools necessary to address this threat. The outcomes of this project will enable future projects to fine map QTL, discover LMA resistant genes and introgression of this trait in the elite Canadian germplasm.

Objectives: 

1. The first step would be to develop and optimize a method for artificially inducing LMA and to develop an enzymatic assay for differentiating the PHS from LMA. This would involve growing potential LMA +ve and LMA -ve varieties in green house/glass chambers and subjecting each plant to a temperature shock on a specific day (about 25-30) post-anthesis. A similar method is used successfully in Australia which will serve as a template for our experiments, but parameters for Canadian weather patterns will need to be optimized. In the first phase, at least 4 lines with 3 temperatures on three days each (36 in total). Depending on the results from this, a second phase will be conducted in which a narrower range of temperature and days of shock will be tested. Seeds harvested from these plants would be tested for its LMA status. A novel enzymatic assay based on the measurement of alfa-amylase and aalfa-glucosidase will be used to identify the presence of LMA in these samples. A new approach to differentiate LMA and PHS affected grains will be investigated. Our lab is developing a new method based on measuring changes in carbohydrate profile of wheat grains. The method is rapid and has a potential to be transferred to NIR for germplasm screening purposes.
2. Screen the CWRS, CPSR and CNHR germplasm for variability for LMA. The protocol developed in objective 1 will be used to screen a total of 100 wheat lines from the CWRS, Canada Prairie Spring Red (CPSR) and Canada Northern Hard Red (CNHR) germplasm. The germplasm will be at various stages of development (F6, F10 and F14) to capture the genetic segregation and variability of expression of the trait in early and advanced generations. The 90k SNP array will be used to genotype the population and high throughput screening method developed in objective 1 will be used to collect the phenotypic data.