Establishing the A. E. Watkins landrace cultivar collection as a resource for systematic gene discovery in bread wheat

Abstract

Key messageA high level of genetic diversity was found in the A. E. Watkins bread wheat landrace collection. Genotypic information was used to determine the population structure and to develop germplasm resources.Abstract In the 1930s A. E. Watkins acquired landrace cultivars of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) from official channels of the board of Trade in London, many of which originated from local markets in 32 countries. The geographic distribution of the 826 landrace cultivars of the current collection, here called the Watkins collection, covers many Asian and European countries and some from Africa. The cultivars were genotyped with 41 microsatellite markers in order to investigate the genetic diversity and population structure of the collection. A high level of genetic diversity was found, higher than in a collection of modern European winter bread wheat varieties from 1945 to 2000. Furthermore, although weak, the population structure of the Watkins collection reveals nine ancestral geographical groupings. An exchange of genetic material between ancestral groups before commercial wheat-breeding started would be a possible explanation for this. The increased knowledge regarding the diversity of the Watkins collection was used to develop resources for wheat research and breeding, one of them a core set, which captures the majority of the genetic diversity detected. The understanding of genetic diversity and population structure together with the availability of breeding resources should help to accelerate the detection of new alleles in the Watkins collection.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00122-014-2344-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Searching for wheat resistance to aphids and wheat bulb fly in the historical Watkins and Gediflux wheat collections

“…Substantial loss of genetic diversity has been shown to have occurred from landraces to modern wheat cultivars (Reif et al , 2005). Additionally, other work has shown there to be differences between the Watkins and Gediflux collections in most of the plant traits measured, such as flowering times, mature plant weight, thousand grain weight, grain surface area and width (Wingen et al , 2014). We did not, however, see a difference in average performance of R. padi and S. avenae between the two collections, suggesting that during modern plant breeding, where improvements have focussed mainly on maximising yield, the plant effect on these aphid species has not been altered.…”

“…The results extracted and reported here relate to the 338 ( R. padi ) and 340 ( S. avenae ) lines included from the Watkins and Gediflux wheat collections. Seeds from the Watkins Core I collection (Wingen et al , 2014) plus other lines were provided by the John Innes Centre Germplasm Resource Unit, Norwich, and seeds from the Gediflux collection from WGIN [Defra (UK) Wheat Genetic Improvement Network]. As all lines could not be tested simultaneously, a commercial variety of T. aestivum , Solstice, was used as a control to provide a comparative standard across all bioassays.…”

“…Many have been lost and the current Watkins collection consists of 826 accessions from around the world showing high genetic diversity and thus containing information on the genetic diversity of wheat before the start of modern breeding. A core collection comprising 119 lines, capturing the majority of the genetic diversity, has been defined (Wingen et al , 2014). New alleles and/or genes for leaf rust resistance, stripe rust resistance and root‐lesion nematode resistance have previously been found in the Watkins collection (Dyck, 1994; Bansal et al , 2011; Thompson & Seymour, 2011).…”

A roadmap for gene functional characterisation in wheat

“…A core set of 107 landraces represents the majority of the variation found in this collection (Wingen et al, 2014). These 107 Watkins landraces have been genotyped with SNP arrays (data in CerealsDB and EnsemblPlants) and used to generate F5:6 mapping populations against the common parent Paragon (Wingen et al, 2017).…”

Exploiting natural variation to improve the content and composition of dietary fibre in wheat grain: A review

“…We have since screened a core set of over 100 lines from the Watkins collection of wheat land races. These were collected from 32 European, Asian, and North African countries in the 1920s and 1930s (MiLLer et al, 2001;Wingen et al, 2014) and are held at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK. Analysis of wholemeal samples grown on the same site for total and water-extractable pentosans (i.e.…”