Progenitor species hold untapped diversity for potential climate-responsive traits for use in wheat breeding and crop improvement.

Climate change will have numerous impacts on crop production worldwide necessitating a broadening of the germplasm base required to source and incorporate novel traits. Major variation exists in crop progenitor species for seasonal adaptation, photosynthetic characteristics, and root system architecture. Wheat is crucial for securing future food and nutrition security and its evolutionary history and progenitor diversity offer opportunities to mine favourable functional variation in the primary gene pool.

Minimising inter-laboratory variation when constructing a unified molecular database of plant varieties in an allogamous crop.

The construction of large-scale databases of molecular profiles of plant varieties for variety identification and diversity analyses is of considerable interest. When varieties of an allogamous species such as oilseed rape are analysed and described using molecular markers such as microsatellites, care is needed to represent the variety in a meaningful yet useful way. It is possible to characterise such heterogeneous genotypes by analysing bulked samples comprising more than one individual seed or plant, but this approach may result in complex microsatellite profiles.