We congratulate Dr Allison Pearson on achieving the South Australian Grains Industry Trust Fund (SAGIT) grant for her research on phenotypic evaluation of a wheat RIL population for salinity tolerance. This project involves the use of a Mocho de Espiga Branca (Mocho) x Gladius RIL population that was developed on a previously funded SAGIT project. This population will be subjected to salt treatments for growth observation and QTL analysis to identify the regions of Mochos genome which gives it barley like levels of salt tolerance. The work will be performed using The Plant Accelerator® at the Waite Campus, and the project will be running until the end of 2019.
We further commend Allison on receiving the Yitpi Foundation grant for her project on improving salinity tolerance of wheat for increased yield in Australian soils. This project entails the genotyping of around 300 wheat RILs from her SAGIT project to construct a genetic map for QTL analysis.
Allison is also an author on a recently published paper in Theoretical and Applied Genetics, issue 10. They identified a novel genetic loci which can be used to enhance the salinity tolerance of wheat in greenhouse conditions. They took this further by translating their results from the greenhouse to the field – something that is rarely done. As a result of their hard work, they identified novel alleles for salinity tolerance in wheat that have been field tested in the Australian environment.
When asked if they had any difficulty carrying out the experiments they commented that there were “no difficulties per say, just that this type of work takes time to publish as we need to do multiple field trials, over several years at several locations”.
We applaud Allison and her team for their persevering efforts to fight salinity and its effects on the growth of Australian plant varieties.
If you are interested in learning more about Allison’s projects, please contact her at allison.pearson@adelaide.edu.au
Ph: 08 8313 1532
Twitter: @Ally_SciGirl