CIMMYT Wheat Breeding and Japan's Contribution to World Wheat Production

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT; located in Mexico; Photo 1) is an international breeding center aiming to improve living standards of poor farmers in the world by providing better wheat and maize varieties. One of the achievements of the institute is a pioneer work on the development of semi-dwarf wheat varieties headed by Dr. Norman Borlaug that led to the Green Evolution. Since then, many of the wheat varieties produced in CIMMYT have been not only directly released to developing countries where their own breeding capacity has not been sufficient but also utilized as breeding materials in many industrialized counties.

As predicted by a report that the world population will increase to 10.9-16.6 billion by the end of this century (UN DESA 2013;http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/index.html), it is necessary to keep releasing higher yield wheat varieties to satisfy increasing food demand.  But in recent years it has become more difficult to catch up this mandate because of global climate change that would cause many abiotic stresses such as drought and heat.

To overcome these difficulties, CIMMYT wheat-breeding program has been utilizing any kind of key methodologies that would be able to facilitate for releasing higher yield and stress resistance varieties, including molecular technique, bioinformatics (such as genomic selection), transgenic, physiological approaches, F1 hybrid wheat, improved agronomical practices and, of course, use of genetic resources (landraces, wheat ancestor and alien species).

It is not known by many Japanese people that Japan has been hugely helping the works of CIMMYT by providing infrastructures including its Genebank building (Photo 2).  Much less people are aware of the more important fact that hundreds of accessions of wheat ancestor species (namely Aegilops tauschii) originally coming from NBRP-Wheat (or Kyoto University prior to the start of NBRP project) have been used to produce new synthetic bread wheats (man-made new bread wheat by crossing durum and Aegilops tauschii; Photo 3) for improvement of drought and other stresses (Photo 4).  It is certain that many of additional genetic resources in NBRP-Wheat will contribute to world wheat production in the future.