Towards a 10K Mutant Resource in Bread Wheat.

The diversity in wheat has been minimized by modern plant breeding in order to maximize yields under favorable conditions. Bread wheat production faces a threat of increasingly unpredictable climate, depleted arable lands, dwindling water resources. Therefore, enhancing the diversity is pivotal in increasing wheat yields and facilitate climate adaption. Mutagenesis in well adapted cultivars/lines can increase the pace of gene evolution by uncovering novel alleles of genes and, hence, assembling new gene combinations. This can be directly used in plant breeding in breaking the yield plateau and enhancing the wheat resilience to environmental stresses. On the other hand, mutants can be used for functional genomic characterization of underpinning genes. Here we report our progress on development of more than 10K mutant resource in five wheat genotypes from different wheat classes using ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS). Five recurrent parents (Overland, Harry, Barnson, RB07, Berkut) of several nested association mapping (NAM) populations have been used to develop this huge mutant resources. The M_2:3 would be phenotypically screened under different stress conditions. Further, several cycles of mutation-stabilization-mutation and recurrent selections will be performed for long term wheat improvement.