Manipulating meiotic crossover control in wheat (MORGAN_J27DTP)

Meiotic recombination generates the genetic diversity on which both evolution and crop breeding depend. In wheat and other cereals, crossovers are strongly biased towards certain regions of the genome, leaving vast stretches almost untouched. This is a major bottleneck for breeders racing to develop climate-resilient varieties, as beneficial alleles within these low-recombination regions cannot easily be separated from linked deleterious variants (“linkage drag”).

This PhD will investigate whether the crossover landscape in wheat can be deliberately manipulated or exploited, combining fundamental meiotic cell biology with applied wheat genetics to generate tools relevant to future-proofing food security. First, you will use TILLING mutant alleles of meiotic genes, together with super-resolution microscopy and genomics, testing whether disrupting specific meiotic mechanisms can redistribute crossovers towards otherwise recombination-poor regions of the wheat genome. Second, you will investigate whether natural allelic variation in meiotic genes achieves the same effect, mining the rich genetic diversity of the JIC Watkins wheat landrace collection. Third, you will develop a high-throughput pollen-typing assay to measure recombination frequency directly in wheat gametes, and use this to run a genome-wide association study across the Watkins panel, hunting for novel loci that could unlock recombination exactly where breeders need it most.

You will be based in the Morgan group, and co-supervised by Dr Simon Griffiths, an expert in wheat quantitative genetics at the John Innes Centre, gaining training across meiotic cytology, molecular genetics, population genomics and quantitative statistical methods. This is a genuinely interdisciplinary project well suited to a student with a background in genetics, plant sciences, or a related bioscience discipline who is excited by fundamental cell biology with a clear route to real-world impact: the alleles and tools this project generates could help breeders develop climate-resilient wheat varieties faster than ever before.