It's not every day that a research team can say they've made a first-of-its kind discovery, but that's what's happening at Washington State University. Researchers there have combined wheat and wheatgrass to create a new species that has the potential to help Pacific Northwest farmers and the environment.

They call the hybrid crop Salish Blue, and it is just one variety of a new perennial grain species, xTritipyrum aaseae. It is the first new species to be named by wheat breeders at WSU in 122 years of breeding.

WSU reported that Colin Curwen-McAdams, a graduate research assistant at the WSU Bread Lab at Mount Vernon, and Stephen Jones, wheat breeder and lab director, have described their work in a recent issue of Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution.

The value of a perennial grain
Bread wheat, an annual crop, is planted and dies in a single generation. With a perennial grain, there's the potential to produce seed for multiple harvests, and that same technology offers ecological benefits for grain production, too. Explained Curwin-McAdams: "Perennial grains add value in ways other than just being wheat. What we need right now are crops that hold the soil, add organic matter and use moisture and nutrients more efficiently. That's the goal of this breeding program."

Salish Blue was developed as a potential food and dairy forage crop for the PNW, and it gives farmers new options. Jones added that they're working with farmers to determine how this new crop would fit into rotations.

A little history on the species name
The name for this new perennial grain species has some history. xTritipyrum aaseae is a new class of hybrid wheat. For the past century, plant breeders around the world have worked to create a perennial grain crop from wheat and its wild relatives. Development of Salish Blue caps 21 years of WSU work to stabilize bread wheat-wheatgrass hybrids, using classical plant breeding without using gene modification.

The challenge? Combining bread wheat and wheatgrass meant working with three different genomes.

So where did that name come from? The new species was named after Hannah Aase (note aaseae as part of the name). She explored wheat genetics as a botanist and cell biologist at Washington State College — later WSU — from 1914 to 1949, and she died in 1980.

Noted Curwin-McAdams: "The work Dr. Aase did was important but largely overlooked. She was trying to answer the question of where wheat comes from. We wanted to honor her and bring her back to the forefront."

In their paper, Curwen-McAdams and Jones call for breeders and geneticists to contribute to nomenclature — how species are named — to advance the science of grain hybrids. "We wanted to lay out a strategy for naming these combinations, and then name one ourselves to show how it's done," said Curwin-McAdams. "It's no longer wheat or wild species. Naming this as a new species lets us think about how it fits into our agriculture."

Source: Washington State University