THOUGHTS FROM THE 9TH INTERNATIONAL WHEAT CONFERENCE

摘要

As a wheat scientist for all of my working life, but on the sidelines these days, the 9th International Wheat Conference (IWC) in Sydney, 21-25 September 2015, provided a great opportunity to catch up. Besides, I had previously participated in the 1stIWC conference in Zagreb, former Yugoslavia, in 1975. Forty years of wheat research should have made a difference, and indeed in this period world wheat yield has doubled from 1.6 t/ha to 3.2 t/ha while area harvested remained unchanged at around 220 Mha (source FAOSTAT). Over the period real US$ wheat prices fell about 50% to a bottom in around 2000, a clear impact of new technology and innovation in world wheat cropping, but since then prices have fluctuated wildly due to other factors coming into play, and currently (2014) real prices sit around twice the 2000 values (source World Bank Commodity prices), adding urgency to this IWC.Although there were only plenary papers, some 50 of them, plus 300 posters, my comments on proceedings will necessarily be incomplete and idiosyncratic, an attempt to capture the useful trends and less useful fashions in wheat research, and to promote myopinions. Conventional breeding achievements were widely reported, but the conference was dominated by new science in the areas of molecular marker-aided and physiologically-based phenotyping and prebreeding for yield and quality traits and some diseaseresistances. Land races, gene banks, wide crossing, gene editing and to a lesser extent, genetic engineering, were the sources of new genetic variation, and high throughput phenotyping (HTP, field or controlled environment) the answer for characterizingthe new traits. Unfortunately, wheat agronomy was barely mentioned, even in its role as facilitator of genetic improvement, but new research funding models and even economics were popular. Speakers are mentioned where appropriate to facilitate searching the presentations once they are uploaded, likely to be at http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/ handle/2123/3168 or nearby, according to IWC Chairman,