Sugar signaling treatment could boost wheat yields by up to 12%

Enhancing wheat plants’ sugar signaling ability could deliver increased yields of up to 12%, according to researchers from Rothamsted, Oxford University and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology. That is an order of magnitude greater than the annual yield increases currently being achieved through breeding.

The effect was achieved by applying a Trehalose 6-phosphate (T6P) pre-signaling molecule to the plants. T6P is a signaling molecule that regulates the plant equivalent of “blood sugar.” It is a major regulator of metabolism, growth and development, including activating the pathway for the synthesis of starch, the world’s most significant food carbohydrate.

The link was discovered during research started at Rothamsted in 2006. Now a four-year-long field study using plots at CIMMYT, Mexico and INTA, Argentina has confirmed that the new technology could deliver major yield improvements.

Wheat has complex genetics and targeting genetic bottlenecks in germplasm makes improvement through breeding far from straightforward. A chemical application of T6P acts as a switch for starch biosynthesis in grain, which forms the basis of wheat yields. This in turn stimulates photosynthesis in the flag leaf, due to greater demand for carbon building blocks for grain filling.

Experiments in controlled environments looked promising, but this new study shows the application can deliver in field conditions. Not only did T6P increase wheat yields in each of the four years in the trials in Argentina and in an additional year at CIMMYT in Mexico, but it did so irrespective of rainfall, the major uncontrolled abiotic factor that limits crop yields globally.

It may even be possible to reduce fertilizer applications as T6P treatment activates genes for amino acid and protein synthesis in grain as well as the pathway for starch synthesis. This is important because a major issue in new higher-yielding wheat varieties is dilution of protein content, requiring increased fertilizer to maintain quality for bread making.

“The path from discovery to translation has taken 25 years,” says Rothamsted’s Dr. Matthew Paul who led the research with Professor Ben Davis at the Rosalind Franklin Institute and Oxford University. “Such timeframes are not untypical in blue-skies plant research, but we do hope new technologies, such as AI and faster analytical techniques, can accelerate this process.

“We will need many more innovations like this to create sustainable and resilient agriculture in the coming decades. I am so grateful to my excellent people, co-workers and teams and for grants from UKRI-BBSRC which made this work possible. Getting this far has been hard work but extremely rewarding.”

Rothamsted and Oxford have created SugaROx, a spinout company, to deliver this research to farmers. Dr. Cara Griffiths, lead author of the research paper and CEO of SugaROx, said, “It’s exciting to be able to take cutting-edge technology from the bench to the field. Getting this kind of impact is often difficult to translate to the field, and this work demonstrated that novel crop inputs have huge promise to enhance yield and resilience in our cropping systems, something that is particularly important in a rapidly changing climate.”

“This work provides an excellent example of a case where direct selective manipulation of key molecular structures, rather than genetics or gene editing, inside a living system is a game changer,” said Professor Davis. “It has been very inspiring to design and discover this new class of ‘drug for plants’ together.”