A concerted effort to decode the genetic basis of tolerance to the yield and quality effects of heat stress in wheat is underway in a multi-institutional collaboration involving Dr Nick Collin’s research group at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) at the University of Adelaide’s Waite Campus and research groups at the NSW Department of Primary Industries in Wagga Wagga and Tamworth.
The GRDC funded collaboration included work undertaken at The Plant Accelerator®, the Adelaide node of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility, where vegetative growth rate and chlorophyll content responses of wheat seedlings to a brief heat stress was measured using automated high-throughput plant imaging.
The project, which has made considerable progress in developing genetic ‘tools’ to select heat tolerant genotypes for future crops able to withstand heat stress, has been summarised in the March-April 2015 issue of Ground Cover.
