Hybrid Wheat
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Hybrid corn is largely to thank for the massive yield increases we’ve seen in that crop over the past century. But attempts at hybrid wheat have never yielded the same results. Sam Eathington at Corteva Agriscience says researchers there think they’ve found a potential solution for one of the biggest barriers to making hybrid wheat a reality: making the wheat plant male sterile for the hybridization process.
Eathington… “ And the challenge has always been, not that hybrids didn't work, it's clear cut. You hybridize the crop, 10- 20% yield improvements, yield stability, just like we saw in the early days with corn. And as the wheat genome got completed and got sequenced, they found the genes they needed to using some classic genetic tricks and techniques. They're able to create this sterility system. They're able to put basically a linking marker on it that we can use to sort, and it just, it all came together. We can make these things sterile, we can get seed set from pollen from other plants. We can sort it out and we see the hybrid performance. And so, you know, the next couple decades in wheat's gonna be quite exciting.”
That’s Sam Eathington on the Agriscience Explained podcast.
