Wheat Ms2 encodes for an orphan protein that confers male sterility in grass species

The dominant male-sterile gene Ms2 has facilitated the release of hundreds of wheat-breeding lines and cultivars in China. Here Ni et al. describe the cloning of the Ms2 gene, which appears as an orphan gene in the Triticinae, and show that Ms2 can be used to confer male sterility in wheat, barley and Brachypodium.