COOPERATIVE GENOMICS-ASSISTED BREEDING FOR ABIOTIC STRESS

The SunGrains (Southern UNiversity Grains) group brings together seven public-sector small grains breeding programs into a single breeding cooperative to facilitate variety development for the Southeast United States. The scale of the combined SunGrains group allows members to collectively implement new technologies and trial lines across the region. Researchers at Louisiana State University (Stephen Harrison, Noah DeWitt), North Carolina State University (J. Paul Murphy, Jeanette Lyerly), Clemson University (Richard Boyles), Texas A&M University (Russel Sutton, Amir Ibrahim), University of Georgia (Mohamed Mergoum), University of Florida (Md. Ali Babar), University of Arkansas (Ehsan Shakiba), and the USDA-ARS (Gina Brown-Guedira) partner to accelerate genetic gain by pooling early generation lines for genotyping, multi-state trialing, and prediction through a shared genomics pipeline. Within this framework, the consideration of genotype by environment interactions and their drivers is a primary interest. Understanding the bases of these interactions can help researchers interpret multi-site trial data and target lines at an early stage to appropriate testing environments. The contribution of heat and other abiotic stresses to these differences in adaptation, and their basis in both differences in phenology and other processes, are a principal research focus. A better understanding of these relationships will improve predictive modeling of wheat yield, and lessons learned might facilitate other cooperative breeding efforts that span multiple target environments.

Projects

• Understanding the contribution of heat and other abiotic stresses to site-specific yield differences in historic breeding trials

• Incorporating information on abiotic stress to improve predictive modeling of site-specific performance of wheat lines as a function of environmental, marker, and phenotypic data

• Genomics-assisted development of facultative winter wheats to maintain adaptation to the Southeast United States in the face of increased winter temperatures and temperature volatility due to climate change