CSIRO invests in research to improve the yield, quality, management and disease resistance of wheat.
Wheat is Australia's most important grain crop, valued at more than A$5 billion annually.
CSIRO invests in research to improve the yield, quality, management and disease resistance of wheat.
Water-use efficiency
All plants exchange water for carbon dioxide to photosynthesise and grow.
CSIRO has used its understanding of how different plants absorb different forms of carbon dioxide to develop a new technique, known as Delta Carbon technology. This can be used to improve water-use efficiency in breeding most major crops.
CSIRO, through its Graingene partnership, has released two commercial wheat varieties, Drysdale and Rees, bred using the technique.
High vigour and improved seedling emergence
CSIRO, through Graingene, is breeding new 'high-vigour' wheats that are so fast-growing they can out-compete weeds while maintaining high yields.
Further research is aimed at:
Breeding is also aimed at incorporating new dwarfing genes into elite wheats. This will enable the wheats to emerge and establish better than wheat varieties that are currently available in Australia.
Salt-tolerant wheat
Both salinity due to rising water tables and natural, or subsoil, salinity impose significant constraints on crop yields.
In collaboration with wheat breeding companies in Australia, CSIRO are breeding salt-tolerant wheat varieties. This will give farmers in salt-affected areas the opportunity to raise the yields of both bread and durum wheat.
High rainfall zone wheats
CSIRO is developing high-yielding, disease-resistant, milling-quality wheat varieties for Australia's high rainfall zones, through its joint venture company HRZ Wheats Pty Ltd.
Improved wheat varieties, tailored to the high rainfall environment, could allow farmers to increase and stabilise incomes rather than depending on sheep and beef.
CSIRO has released numerous dual-purpose feed wheats which are suitable for grazing by sheep or cattle and for grain production. Recent releases such as Mackellar, Tennant, Brennan and Rudd are resistant to the most serious diseases in the wheat belt.
Drought resistance
Using a range of wheat varieties sourced from around the world, CSIRO is identifying plant features useful for improving wheat yield under drought conditions, for both conventional and newer farming systems.
The aim is to identify the genes responsible for these features, develop 'molecular markers' that flag their location and select improved germplasm, making classical breeding quicker and more effective.
Water limiting conditions during flowering are particularly damaging to wheat crops. A new focus is therefore to select for varieties that maintain high grain yields during reproductive stage drought conditions. We have made progress in understanding the molecular mechanism of cold and drought-induced sterility and identification of the genes involved is currently in progress in the model system rice. This knowledge will be exploited to identify genes and markers for precision breeding of drought tolerant wheat varieties.
Healthier wheats
As part of the Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO is developing new strains of both bread and durum wheat with the potential to improve human health.
Wheats are being targeted which have:
Researchers will be using:
Related information sheets
Related scientific papers
Read more about CSIRO's wheat research.
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