PhD student John Innes Centre/University of Birmingham Norwich, England, United Kingdom
Body of Abstract: Micronutrient deficiency affects more than 2 billion people and is mainly prevalent in the poorest rural societies in developing countries. They rely on staple foods such as wheat and rice that are sustaining but often deficient in iron/zinc. Genetic biofortification through breeding offers a sustainable solution to malnutrition problems. In this study, we screened a hundred EMS (Ethyl methane sulfonate) lines by Perls staining and selected three high iron lines with approximately 3x the wild-type level of iron to develop the mapping populations. Twenty plants with extremely low and high phenotypes for the iron were selected from an F2 population to construct low and high bulks and subjected to bulked segregant analysis using exome capture sequencing. We are currently analyzing the sequencing data which will allow us to identify the genomic regions which associate with the iron for future identification of candidate genes and introgression into breeding lines.