The Use of Monosomic Rye Addition Lines for Transferring Rye Chromatin into Bread Wheat

The successful transfer of mildew resistance, plant height suppression, leaf colour and several quantitative traits effecting yield from rye into wheat is demonstrated. Plants exhibiting these characters were derived from genotypes which contained a homozygous wheat genome (21”) and different number of additional rye chromosomes in the monosomic condition. Using the C‐banding technique wheat/rye translocation could not be detected in these plants, indicating that the size of the transferred segment must have been below the resolution power of this technique. The results suggest that in wheat plants with additional rye chromosomes in monosomic condition small segments of rye chromosomes with valuable genes are being transferred into wheat by translocation, most probably, between homoeologous wheat and rye chromosomes. The technique described in this paper appears to be a simple way of using rye chromatin in wheat improvement.