Wheat provides 20 percent of global calories and protein, and researchers estimate the world will need an additional 224 to 359 million tons per year by 2050. Yet with suitable wheatland nearly maxed out, any increase in production will have to come from increasing yields, which have flattened over the last few decades. Schnurbusch, a plant geneticist at Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), hopes to break through the yield ceiling by using genes from mutants and traditional landrace crops to change the architecture of the wheat plant to produce more grain per stem. The IPK maintains the largest seed bank in Europe, with more than sixty-six thousand unique cultivars of cereal grains, some dating back to 1908.
