New Strain of "Superwheat" Could Be An Answer To Food Security Concerns

A new, bigger, stronger strain of wheat has been created by British scientists who bred the "superwheat" by combining a modern wheat variety with an ancient one.

Scientists at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany say that the U.K.'s wheat yields could increase by as much as 30 percent by introducing the new strain of synthetic wheat.

The synthetic wheat is a recreation of a the original cross between an ancient wheat and a wild grass that grew in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. The process required no genetic modification.  

Crossing modern strains of wheat with the new synthetic strain could offer new sources of yield improvement, drought tolerance, disease resistance and input use efficiency, researchers report.

Most of the modern wheat evolved from a strain of goat crass and other primitive grains that came to be about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East.  But over the years, domestication of wheat has eroded the plant's natural diversity, said Tina Barsby of NIAB.

Barsby said that the new synthetic strain will recapture "some of that variation from those ancient wild relatives lost during the domestication of wheat as agriculture evolved. Fully crossable with modern wheat these synthetic wheats are an excellent bridge for transferring novel sources of genetic diversity from wild relatives into varieties already grown by farmers across the UK."

She said that while initially the increased domestication of wheat increased overall yield, recently the wheat yields have decreased, which causes food security concerns.

One in five of all the calories consumed round the world come from wheat, the BBC reports.

British cereal maker Weetabix reported that is would have to scale back production of some of its products due to poor wheat harvest in the U.K, according to BBC.