Research on perennial wheat has proffered not only promise, but genetically, a big surprise. Conventional wisdom has long held that the factors determining whether a plant is annual or perennial are very complex, influenced in subtle ways by genes spread over a number of the plant’s chromosomes.

Faced with this complexity, breeding perennial habits into domestic wheat would seem daunting, if not impossible, due to the fact that the chromosomes of wheat and its wild relatives do not pair.

Even though hybridization is still possible, if chromosomes do not pair, says Jones, two things are likely to occur. One is sterility. The other is that the chromosomes cannot exchange genetic material.

“If you cross normal wheat A with normal wheat B,” says Jones, “they combine and recombine chromosomes like most living things do. But in these crosses they don’t. So that greatly complicates things.”

Complicated as combining the best traits from wheat and its wild relatives is, however, what Jones and Murray have found concerning the genetic stimulus toward perennialism very much contradicts the conventional wisdom.

“We have plants that have only a single chromosome arm, or less, from this wild wheat,” says Jones. And these plants decided to live.

Jones and his lab are also interested in the biological cost of a plant’s living rather than dying. The classic assumption has been that annuals yield more because they go for broke, putting all their energy into producing seed rather than the plant material necessary to get them through the year. What Jones and his colleagues are finding, however, is that plants, at least wheat and its kin, seem to have plenty of energy to go around. In fact, they have some hybrid lines that are producing the same yield of seed as conventional wheat, yet are still signaling their roots and crowns that they want to live.

“We’re getting very close,” says Jones, referring to understanding what confers life or death. In fact, he believes it may be determined by a single gene. Such a discovery would have enormous implications for both agriculture and our understanding of plant genetics, and a whole region of Washington might soon be transformed, beginning with a single gene.

WSM Home

Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4