Doubled Haploid Production from Spanish and Central European Spelt by Anther Culture

In recent years, spelt (Triticum aestivum (L.) ssp. Spelta) has become an added-value alternative crop to modern wheat. Spanish spelt constitutes a unique separate gene pool from central European germplasm. The availability of spelt Doubled Haploid (DH) production protocol is a great advantage to speed up breeding programs. This is the first study evaluating the ability of DH plant production, by anther culture, of five Spanish spelt landraces and three F5 lines derived from Spanish spelt x bread wheat crosses. Two central European commercial varieties were also included in the analysis. DH plants were obtained from all material with the exception of one F5 line. The Spanish spelt landraces produced more embryos/100 anthers (73-166.3) than the two European varieties (8.6-22.2). The main bottleneck in the Spanish germplasm was the high number of albino plants regenerated, with percentage of green plants lower than 13% in three of the landraces. Nevertheless,  up to 15.6 and 1.8 green plants/100 anthers were obtained from the Spanish and the central European germplasm, respectively. A great variation in the percentage of spontaneous chromosome doubling was obtained, with 4 lines producing around 80% and 2 lines less than 15%. The ovary genotype used for anther co-culture is a critical factor to increase the efficiency of the system. Bread wheat ‘Caramba’ ovaries increased almost 6 times the number of green plants as compared to spelt landrace ‘BG-1987’ ovaries. This study shows that DH plants can be produced efficiently from Spanish spelt to be used in breeding programs.