As Research Director of the Nottingham/BBSRC Wheat Research Centre at The University of Nottingham, UK, my main research interest is focused on transferring genetic variation for agronomically and scientifically important traits from wild and distantly related species into wheat, and to distribute the germplasm generated world-wide for exploitation in breeding programmes and in scientific research.
Much of the work undertaken on wheat has been based on my earlier work on the forage grasses where the entire genome of Festuca pratensis was transferred into Lolium perenne in small overlapping chromosome segments.
The wheat/wild relative research has generated over 1000 new introgresisons, for example, 98.8% of the genome of Triticum timopheevii has been transferred into wheat, enabling the systematic exploitation of genetic variation from wheat’s wild relatives for both research and breeding. The success of the programme has resulted from combining specific wheat/wild relative crossing strategies with cutting edge marker technologies.
