JIC - John Innes Centre

The John Innes Centre is an independent, international centre, based in the United Kingdom. It focuses on fundamental and future oriented research in plant science, genetics and microbiology. Research conducted at the John Innes Centre advances the understanding of plant growth and responses to the environment, with significant implications for agricultural practices and food security.

Role in the project

JIC Germplasm Resources (GR) team, specialised in ex-situ cereal and legume crop gene-pool conservation and its delivery to end users, will lead WP2 for ex-situ conservation. The GR team, will also participate in pre-breeding activities as part of WP3 for exploiting CWRs to increase crop diversity.

In WP2, the CWR diversity will be compartmentalised to ensure it is amenable for reproducible genomics. Additionally, deep characterisation of diverse crop wild relative panels will be carried out in agricultural field environments, with their performance under biotic-stress compared to that of their related crops.

As part of WP3 Pro-Wild effort is supported to exploit pre-breeding material by evaluating modern crop lines containing introgressed ‘wild genomic regions’.

The Germplasm Resources contributed by JIC to Pro-Wild project include globally distributed wheat wild relatives and introgressed germplasm arising from the Designing Future Wheat UKRI-BBSRC cross institute project, producing Academic and Breeder Toolkit Collections. All of JIC GR germplasm is publicly available: Link

Key persons involved

• Dr Noam Chayut

Further information

Links: JIC - Germplasm Resources team, Designing Future Wheat Project