Heckmann Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2020

Meiosis in barley: Mixing it up

Progress in plant breeding towards superior varieties relies on selecting favourable traits after creating genetically diverse material. This is primarily achieved by homologous recombination (HR) during meiosis, when programmed DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) are alternatively repaired as crossover (CO, resulting in new parental chromosome combinations) or as non-crossover (NCO, restoring the previous situation). In cereal crops such as barley, recombination by CO occurs mainly near chromosome ends leaving the main body of genetic material untouched. NCO repair can also result in NCO gene conversion (NCO-GC), non-reciprocal exchange of short DNA stretches between alleles. More than 90% of…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.