over the last hundred and fifty years plant breeding has largely been responsible for increasing the amount of food required to feed our expanding global population breeding generally relies on crossing parental varieties and then identifying superior individuals among the offspring in which the best gene variants or alleles have been combined into a single plant combining alleles of different genes occurs during a special cell division called meiosis through a process termed recombination recombination shuffles the genetic variation already present in the parents by highly controlled breaking and rejoining of parental chromosomes unfortunately major cereal crops such as wheat or barley are often characterized by having large genomes and these mainly recombine at the ends of their chromosomes this is a problem for breeding progress because around 20 to 30 percent of the alleles are effectively trapped in regions that rarely if ever recombine and are therefore inaccessible a team of eight researchers working on the ERC funded project shuffle aims to develop breakthrough technologies that will improve the distribution of recombination along each chromosome allowing breeders to access the genetic variation located in these currently inaccessible regions and create varieties with all desirable alleles recombination is complex and involves many different proteins playing highly specific roles to understand what each protein does shuffle is using naturally or newly created disruptive gene variants the impact of these variants is then assessed to see if they have the potential to modulate recombination frequency or shift patterns of recombination away from the chromosome ends success will allow breeders to access their currently inaccessible genetic variation accelerating progress in plant breeding and leading to the development of new improved and resilient crops the knowledge gained in the shuffle project could also be transferable to other crops thereby contributing to the sustainable increase in global food production benefitting human consumption biodiversity and habitation you [Music]