Triticale

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

triticale of the genus X. Triticosecale, a new kind of cereal grain created by man. Its development began in 1876 when a Scottish botanist, A. Stephen Wilson, first managed to produce seedlings of an artificial cross between wheat and rye. The name ‘triticale’ is a combination of the botanical generic names of wheat (Triticum) and rye (Secale).

Such crosses occasionally occur naturally in the field, but the resulting hybrids are always sterile. Nevertheless, the prospect was attractive: a cereal with the superior bread-making properties of wheat and the hardiness of rye. Wilson’s plants were also sterile; but in 1891 a German, Rimpau, managed to produce partly fertile side shoots on an otherwise sterile plant. It was not until the 1930s that further progress was made. By this time more was known about genetics, in particular concerning the experimental doubling of chromosome numbers in plants, which could be done by treating them with the chemical colchicine.