I am working on improving drought resistance in wheat. My project is focused on identifying a gene from the rye 1RS.1BL translocation that confers drought resistance in the field.

Using a variety of methods including high throughput phenopying, high throughput genotyping and custom marker development, I used near isogenic lines to identify a small distal region of the 1RS arm which is responsible for the drought resistance conferred by the 1RS translocation, summarized in my 2014 TAG publication.

I am now focused on fine mapping the region to identify candidate genes. This is complicated by the fact that recombination is suppressed between wheat and rye chromosomes, so I am using a deletion mapping approach. Using Illumina sequencing data on two flow sorted chromosome arms, I am using a kmer based bioinformatic approach for developing polymorphic markers in the region previously mapped.