Wheat remains worldwide staple.

• Position: Crops - Researches develop genetically modified wheat for cold-weather environments

A clearer picture of how wheat has been able to adapt to such a wide range of climates and become one of the world's staple food grains has been pieced together by a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis. They accomplished this by isolating and cloning the VRN2 gene in wheat, which controls vernalization--the cold-weather requirement for triggering flowering. The findings of the study have practical implications for improving wheat varieties through manipulation of flowering times.

The researchers, who in 2003 cloned the first wheat vernalization gene, VRN1, discovered that VRN1 and VRN2 work together to confer the winter growth habit. They showed that loss-of-function mutations in either of these two genes result in spring wheat varieties that do not require cold weather to initiate flowering. These can be planted in spring to grow throughout the warmer months of the year. On the contrary, winter wheat germinates and goes through early stages in the fall but waits until the very cold winter weather passes before flowering in spring.

"During the 10,000 years of domestication of wheat, different mutations occurred in these two genes,"...