Can Synthetic Allopolyploids be Tailored to become Novel Crop Plants?

The ability to re-synthesise such allopolyploids from new parents from different climates or with specific stress-resistance genes, would provide a rapid, non-GMO, breeding strategy, of introducing desired genes. However, replicating these wide-crosses in the laboratory (synthetically) results in allopolyploids that are sterile or near-sterile due to chromosome instability caused by incorrect chromosome pairing at meiosis. Our recent work may have uncovered a solution to this problem, which we intend to pursue in this grant.