Super-yielding wheat may solve food crisis | The Australian

A FLUKE experiment tinkering with the genes of Australian wheat has created a new variety that could rocket wheat yields by 30 per cent a year....

...Grains Research & Development Corporation chief John Harvey described the surprise breeding breakthrough as one of the most exciting scientific advances for wheat in decades.

"It was a lucky, serendipitous discovery," a delighted Mr Harvey told a national grain industry conference in Melbourne. "Researchers at CSIRO's division of Plant Industry were looking at ways to change starch in wheat (for industrial processing reasons) and noticed when they grew (these new wheat types) the plants ended up 30 per cent larger, with 30 per cent bigger heads and a 30 per cent increase in grain yield."

The new "super-wheat", bred by a research team in Canberra headed by Matthew Morell, is being grown in field trials in three locations around Australia...

@ Super-yielding wheat may solve food crisis | The Australian:

Update: The Peer-reviewed paper

Down-regulation of Glucan, Water-Dikinase activity in wheat endosperm increases vegetative biomass and yield.

A novel mechanism for increasing vegetative biomass and grain yield has been
identified in wheat (Triticum aestivum). RNAi-mediated down-regulation of Glucan, Water-Dikinase (GWD), the primary enzyme required for starch phosphorylation, under the control of an endosperm-specific promoter, resulted in a decrease in starch phosphate content and an increase in grain size. Unexpectedly, consistent increases in vegetative biomass and grain yield were observed in subsequent generations. In lines where GWD expression was decreased, germination rate was slightly reduced. However, significant increases in vegetative growth from the two leaf stage were observed. In glasshouse pot trials, down-regulation of GWD led to a 29% increase in grain yield while in glasshouse tub trials simulating field row spacing and canopy development, GWD down-regulation resulted in a grain yield increase of 26%. The enhanced yield resulted from a combination of increases in seed weight, tiller number, spikelets per head and seed number per spike. In field trials, all vegetative phenotypes were reproduced with the exception of increased tiller number. The expression of the transgene and suppression of endogenous GWD RNA levels were demonstrated to be grain specific.
In addition to the direct effects of GWD down-regulation, an increased level of
α-amylase activity was present in the aleurone layer during grain maturation.
These findings provide a potentially important novel mechanism to increase
biomass and grain yield in crop improvement programmes.

Ral JP, Bowerman AF, Li Z, Sirault X, Furbank R, Pritchard JR, Bloemsma M,
Cavanagh CR, Howitt CA, Morell MK.

CSIRO Food Futures National Research Flagship, Canberra, ACT, Australia CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra, ACT, Australia Research School of Biology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia.

Plant Biotechnol J. 2012 Jun 6. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7652.2012.00711.x. [Epub
ahead of print]

© 2012 CSIRO. Plant Biotechnology Journal © 2012 Society for Experimental
Biology, Association of Applied Biologists and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.