The CGIAR Research Program on Wheat’s (WHEAT) synthetic wheat breeding strategy, which successfully transfers valuable diversity from wild goat grass to modern wheat, is providing farmers with climate-resilient, pest and disease-resistant wheat.

CGIAR Research Program on Wheat. 2019. The CGIAR Research Program on Wheat’s (WHEAT) synthetic wheat breeding strategy, which successfully transfers valuable diversity from wild goat grass to modern wheat, is providing farmers with climate-resilient, pest and disease-resistant wheat.. Reported in Wheat Annual Report 2019. Outcome Impact Case Report.

The breeding practice of using "synthetic hexaploid wheat" to incorporate genetic diversity from wild wheat relatives into modern varieties benefits the world's farmers through climate resilient and pest-resistant wheat. A 2019 study validated this practice, finding that 20% of the wheat lines in CIMMYT?s global spring bread wheat breeding program contain an average of 15% of the genome segments from the wild wheat relative Aegilops tauschii.