Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production | College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at UMD
News that a single mutant gene could triple wheat yields raises some uncomfortable questions for Bible-literalist creationists, and indeed for anyone who believes their god created the Earth and all life on it exclusively for humans — its supposed favoured species, for whom “all of creation” was made.
This belief has profoundly shaped Western attitudes towards the planet and its resources. One consequence of this selfish worldview has been the destruction of vast areas of the Earth, its ecosystems, and the countless species that depend on them. In the relentless search for mineral wealth, cropland, and grazing land, humans have transformed immense regions into effective monocultures which, to anything not adapted to those particular crops, might as well be deserts. Moreover, the same belief — coupled with the idea that brown and black people were inferior to whites and therefore “created” to serve Europeans — helped justify imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.
One question that creationists, in my experience, consistently shy away from is this: if an omniscient god truly created our domestic animals for our use, why have we almost always had to modify them through selective breeding to make them more useful? It’s as though this god didn’t actually know what we would need or how we would use these animals. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: why didn’t this supposedly omniscient being create ideal domestic plants and crops in the first place?
Domestication of wheat. The domestication of wheat is one of the earliest and most significant events in the history of agriculture and human civilisation. It marks a key step in the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to settled farming communities. The story is complex, involving multiple species, hybridisation events, and centuries of human selection.And now we learn, from an open-access paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that wheat yields could have been far higher if wheat had originally been “created” with this mutant gene.
Origins and Early Domestication
Wheat was first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent — a region spanning parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Türkiye, Israel, Lebanon, and Iran — around 10,000 years ago (c. 8500 BCE).
The earliest domesticated forms were einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) and emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum). These were derived from wild relatives native to the region:
- Wild einkorn (T. boeoticum) grew naturally in the hills of the northern Levant and Anatolia.
- Wild emmer (T. dicoccoides) originated from hybridisation between two wild grasses, T. urartu (a wild wheat) and Aegilops speltoides (a goatgrass).
Genetic Hybridisation and Evolution
Emmer wheat is a tetraploid (four sets of chromosomes), arising from a natural hybridisation between two diploid wild species. Later, emmer wheat hybridised again with another wild goatgrass, Aegilops tauschii, producing hexaploid wheat — the ancestor of modern bread wheat (Triticum aestivum). This second hybridisation likely occurred around 8,000 years ago.
This process was entirely natural hybridisation, followed by artificial selection by humans who favoured plants with desirable traits such as:
- Non-shattering seed heads (so the grains stayed on the stalks for harvest),
- Larger seeds with more starch,
- Greater yields,
- Easier threshing and milling.
Domestication Traits
Domestication of wheat involved selecting for mutations that made the plants more manageable:These changes made wheat less “fit” in the wild but far more productive in cultivated fields — a hallmark of domesticated species.
- Non-brittle rachis: Wild wheat disperses its seeds by the rachis (the central stem) shattering when ripe. Mutations that made the rachis rigid allowed humans to harvest intact ears.
- Larger grain size: A direct result of selecting seeds from larger plants.
- Loss of natural seed dispersal: Making the plant dependent on humans for propagation.
Archaeological Evidence
- Archaeological sites such as Göbekli Tepe and Jericho show evidence of wild and early domesticated wheat use.
- Charred grains, sickle blades with silica sheen, and grinding stones all indicate deliberate harvesting and processing.
Spread Beyond the Fertile Crescent
Wheat cultivation spread rapidly:As it spread, local farmers continued to select for regionally adapted varieties, leading to enormous genetic and morphological diversity.
- To Europe by around 6000 BCE via the Danube corridor.
- To the Indus Valley by around 5000 BCE.
- To China and sub-Saharan Africa in later millennia.
- To the Americas after the Columbian Exchange.
Modern Developments
- In the 20th century, wheat underwent intensive breeding to increase yield, disease resistance, and adaptability.
- The Green Revolution in the mid-20th century introduced dwarf, high-yielding varieties.
- Current research — such as the work on mutant genes that can boost productivity — builds on this long evolutionary and agricultural history.
Summary:
Wheat was not “created” as a ready-made crop. It emerged through a combination of chance hybridisation and thousands of years of human selection. Modern wheat is a genetically complex, heavily domesticated plant that depends entirely on humans for its survival and reproduction — a strong rebuttal to claims of perfect design.
Of course, as any plant geneticist will explain, wheat itself arose from a chance hybridisation between two wild species — neither of which was particularly useful in its original form. The same is true of other staple crops such as rice and potatoes.
The discovery of this mutant gene by researchers at the University of Maryland is described in a news release from the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production
University of Maryland Researchers Found the Gene Responsible for Rare Variety of Wheat with Three Ovaries
University of Maryland researchers discovered the gene that makes a rare form of wheat grow three ovaries per flower instead of one. Since each ovary can potentially develop into a grain of wheat, the gene could help farmers grow much more wheat per acre. Their work was published on October 14, 2025, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A spike of wheat showing three grains clustered within each spikelet, where there is ordinarily just one.Credit: Vijay Tiwary, University of Maryland, USA.
The special trait of growing three ovaries per flower was initially discovered in a spontaneously occurring mutant of common bread wheat. But it wasn’t clear what genetic changes led to the new trait. The UMD team created a highly detailed map of the multi-ovary wheat’s DNA and compared it to regular wheat. They discovered that the normally dormant gene WUSCHEL-D1 (WUS-D1) was “switched on” in the multi-ovary wheat. When WUS-D1 is active early in flower development, it enlarges the flower-building tissues, enabling them to produce extra female parts like pistils or ovaries.
If breeders can control or mimic this genetic trick of activating WUS-D1, they could design new wheat varieties that grow more kernels per plant. Even small gains in the number of kernels per plant can translate into huge increases in food supply at the global scale.
Pinpointing the genetic basis of this trait offers a path for breeders to incorporate it into new wheat varieties, potentially increasing the number of grains per spike and overall yield. By employing a gene editing toolkit, we can now focus on further improving this trait for enhancing wheat yield. This discovery provides an exciting route to develop cost-effective hybrid wheat.
Associate Professor Vijay Tiwari, co-author.
Department of Plant Sciences and Landscape Architecture
University of Maryland, MD, USA.
That’s important because wheat is one of the world’s staple crops, feeding billions of people every day. As global demand for wheat continues to rise, climate change, limited farmland, and population growth make it increasingly difficult to increase production using traditional methods. This discovery could give breeders a powerful new tool to boost yields without needing more land, water, or fertilizer.
The discovery of WUS-D1 could also lead to the development of similar multi-ovary varieties of other grain crops.
In addition to Dr. Tiwari, other authors of this paper from the University of Maryland Department of Plant Sciences include lead author and faculty assistant Adam Schoen, Professor Yiping Qi, Professor Emeritus Angus Murphy, Associate Professor Nidhi Rawat, Assistant Professor Daniel Rodriguez-Leal, Assistant Research Scientist Weifeng Luo, PhD student Anmol Kajla, Post Doctoral Associate Parva Kumar Sharma, and Alex Mahlandt (a former MS student from Tiwari lab).
Publication:
So, the obvious question for advocates of Intelligent Design, who insist that genomes are the product of deliberate intelligence, is this: why would an intelligent designer include a gene capable of tripling wheat yields, then switch it off and conceal it?Significance
Grain number determines the yield of our major cereals, and increasing the number and fertility of female organs offers an opportunity to boost productivity and improve breeding efficiency. Consequently, plant types that produce more sites for grain production are of particular interest to cereal breeders. Here, we reveal that the wheat multiovary mutant contains a genome rearrangement that activated a key meristem regulatory gene, WUSCHEL-1, which is usually dormant on the D genome of wheat. Expression of this gene enlarges floral meristems and facilitates the formation of multiple pistils. These results lay the groundwork for developing new gene-editing strategies that target meristem regulators to increase grain number in wheat, supporting breeding efforts aimed at boosting food production.
Abstract
Innovative genetic improvements in food crops are needed to maintain global food security. Here, we report the map-based cloning of TaWUSCHEL-D1 (WUS-D1) as the gene responsible for the multiovary phenotype in wheat, which produces three fertile ovaries and grains per floret. We generated a 14.5 Gbp chromosome-level assembly of multiovary wheat line “MOV” that shows unique structural variation in the Mov-1 physical region, resulting in widespread gene upregulation. High-resolution genetic mapping refined the locus to a 135 kbp region that contains two genes. We used nine independent deletion mutants, eight TILLING mutants, and genetic complementation of these genotypes to show that a WUSCHEL ortholog, WUS-D1, is the causal gene of the Mov-1 locus. Expression studies showed that WUS-D1 is highly expressed during early inflorescence development in MOV, whereas the gene is inactive in wild-type wheat. The higher WUS-D1 expression is associated with the formation of larger meristems and floret primordia that are competent to produce multiple ovaries. These insights provide a foundation to manipulate floral organ numbers to enhance breeding capabilities of bread wheat.
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum, 2n = 6× = 42) contributes substantially to humankind’s caloric and nutritional requirements. As wheat yields have plateaued over the past 30 y across all major growing regions, novel genetic approaches are required to sustainably increase productivity (1, 2). Among the complex factors that contribute to yield, those impacting source and sink functions are prominent (3, 4). Traits that influence the size and number of sink organs, such as grains, can enhance the utilization of assimilates stored in source tissue (3–5 In wheat, genes controlling sink traits such as grain size have been identified and, in some cases, integrated as selection targets in breeding programs (6–9). Sink capacity can also be enhanced by increasing grain number per inflorescence, known as a “spike” in wheat, so long as the extra grains do not penalize grain size and overall yield. This could be achieved by increasing the number of branching units along the spike (spikelets), which typically contain multiple florets (10–13). An underexplored alternative to increase branching units is to boost the number of grains per spikelet (14).
A typical wheat spike contains between 18 and 28 spikelets, which produce 3-4 fertile florets depending on the environment and genetic background (10, 12, 14, 15). Florets contain three stamens and a single ovary, which will form one grain following fertilization (16). A historical mutant that disrupts the typical floral architecture of wheat is the multiovary (MOV) mutant—also known as Tri-grain, Tri-pistil, or Multiple Pistil wheat—that forms up to three functional ovaries under control of a dominant allele that shows high penetrance when crossed with diverse cultivars (17–19). The Mov-1 locus has been mapped to chromosome 2DL, which is shared with the Tri-grain and Tri-pistil alleles, indicating they are from the same complementation group (20–22). However, the gene underlying this trait and the nature of the contributing allele has remained unknown, despite the availability of reference wheat genomes since 2018 (23, 24). In this study, we show that multiovary development is driven by an unbalanced intrachromosomal rearrangement that is associated with high expression of a wheat WUSCHEL1 (WUS1) ortholog, which is normally dormant on the D genome (WUS-D1) of bread wheat. The increased expression of WUS-D1 during early reproductive stages is accompanied by enlarged inflorescence and floret meristems (FM), relative to wild-type siblings. Our study reveals the genetic basis of multiovary wheat, which lays the foundation for generating germplasm that will boost grain number and advance breeding capabilities.
A. Schoen,G.V. Yoshikawa,P.K. Sharma,A. Mahlandt,Y. Chen,H. Sheng,L. Kochian,P. Gao,D. Xiang,T.D. Quilichini,P. Venglat,S. Wang,I.S. Yadav,R. Sablowski,Y. Wang,P. Zhang,A. Whibley,A. Hill,Y. Gu,D. Rodriguez-Leal,W. Luo,Y. Qi,N. Meier,A. Kajla,M. Willman,G. Brown-Guedira,S.A. Simpson,R.C. Youngblood,A. Hulse-Kemp,A. Murphy,B. Gill,C. Uauy,R. Datla,N. Rawat,S.A. Boden, & V. Tiwari,
WUSCHEL-D1 upregulation enhances grain number by inducing formation of multiovary-producing florets in wheat
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122(42) e2510889122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2510889122 (2025).
Copyright: © [year] The authors.
Published by [publisher]. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
The benefits to humanity of this super-productive wheat would be immense — not merely in reducing costs and increasing food security, but also in drastically lowering the environmental impact of agriculture. If the same quantity of wheat could be grown on just one third of the land currently required, vast areas could be spared from conversion into monoculture. That, in turn, would mean less habitat destruction, lower pressure on biodiversity, and a reduced carbon footprint from industrial farming.
Yet, instead of finding perfectly engineered crops designed for human use, we repeatedly uncover evidence of messy evolutionary processes — silent genes, redundant sequences, and traits that only become useful when humans identify and exploit them. As with domestic animals, the wheat we rely on today is not a gift from a designer, but the outcome of blind natural processes followed by human selection over millennia.
Once again, the evidence points not to intelligence, foresight, or divine planning, but to the real, observable mechanisms of evolution and human ingenuity — the only “designers” involved in shaping the plants that sustain us. If this is Intelligent Design, it is the work of a remarkably careless and indolent designer who left humanity to do much of the work.
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