Dissecting Gene Network Underlying Essential Micronutrients like Iron, Zinc and Toxic Elements like Cadmium to Improve Wheat Nutritional Quality for Human Health.

Malnutrition caused by inadequate intake of essential micronutrients in daily diet affects more than 3 billion people, posing serious consequence to human health and economic development. At the same time, certain toxic elements present in soils and translocated to the plants and then grains, pose serious health issues in humans. For example, Cadmium (Cd), a biotoxic heavy metal, which when accumulated in the human body, causes injury and chronic disease in the kidney, as well as increased cancer incidence.

Bio-fortification (breeding crops to increase their nutritional value) of crops is considered an effective approach to increases the bioavailable concentrations of essential elements in the edible portions of crops. As wheat is the staple food for more than 40% of the global human population, it is an excellent target crop for bio-fortification.

An appropriate approach would be to develop wheat varieties which have more desirable micronutrient composition and no or minimum toxic element accumulation in grains. In order to achieve this goal in a sustainable manner, it is essential to understand the complex genetics of these microelements and develop resources for genomics assisted breeding. Here, we used large collections of durum and hexaploid wheat as well as bi-parental populations to dissect the gene network underlying essential micronutrients and toxic heavy metals in wheat grains. The plant material was evaluated under different climatic conditions and phenotyped for cadmium, aluminum, iron, copper, manganese, zinc, and genotyped using Illumina’s 90K Infinium SNP assay. The results of dissection of main effects, epistatic gene networks and genomic predictions will be reported in this presentation. This research will provide new knowledge on the gene network responsible for wheat micronutrient composition and also develop resources, which could play an important role in improving nutritional value of wheat using genomic tools.