Testimony of Jessica Paris, PhD student at IJPB and BASF

Jessica Paris is developing the following topic.

Identification of molecular mechanisms subtending bread wheat androgenesis: a chemical biology approach

Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the most widely cultivated cereal grain, representing 19% of total calories and 20% of all proteins in the average human diet. Because wheat is an inbred plant, major improvement may be obtained through modern breeding techniques, in particular the development of hybrids, derived from a specific cross between two agronomically sound parental lines to exploit heterosis. To speed up selection programs, wheat breeders have relied for decades on the production of doubled haploid plants, also known as haplodiploids, for the creation of novel varieties. Haplodiploidization is an invaluable strategy to accelerate breeding because the haplodiploids are fixed as pure homozygotes within a single generation, thereby avoiding the more conventional, time consuming, self- or backcrossing selection schemes.

This collaborative project between BASF Agro France (Milly-la-Forêt Breeding Station) and the "Biology of the Cell and Regeneration" BCR team is dedicated to the identification of bioactive molecules that might increase the efficiency of winter wheat haplodiploid in vitro production through androgenesis. We will take advantage of an automated platform to screen a publicly available chemical library using microspore cultures as a system.  In parallel, we will gain a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying androgenesis by means of single-cell transcriptome analyses run at different stages of development and under different chemical treatments.