The team of UK and US experts believe the discoveries will speed up the development of wheat with traits such as disease resistance and increased yield, highly sought-after qualities by farmers.
NFU chief combinable crops adviser Guy Gagen said: “This is a sign of fantastic progress in improving wheat to address a number of challenges that are facing arable farmers. The potential to see the wheat crop develop to become more disease resistant with increased yields is very exciting for the industry.
“After the NFU called for a stronger focus on crop research, it’s encouraging to see these discoveries come to light and in a few years’ time they could really make a difference to farmers on the ground. Global competition has never been higher in our industry and breakthroughs like this are pleasing to see.
“If we can improve the nutrition quality and reduce the production impacts of our wheat, we will have an even stronger product to sell to the market and that can only help improve the competitiveness of the UK arable industry.
“Weather remains a huge factor affecting wheat crops and there will be increasing challenges with the changing climate that continues to change the way we work. These types of variations identified help make wheat growing more sustainable and are very welcome indeed.”
The research was conducted by the Earlham Institute, John Innes Centre, Rothamsted Research and the University of California, Davis, who have catalogued ten million mutations by sequencing 400 billion bases of DNA from nearly 2735 wheat lines.
The collection is publicly available for researchers and breeders to search the database to identify changes in their genes of interest and request seeds to help improve wheat.