PhenoMix: Improving the climatic resilience of bread wheat by phenomic and genomic selection
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Abstract
Drought stress is currently a major constraint limiting crop production worldwide and is expected to become an even more severe challenge for agricultural production in the future. Breeding and growing of adapted plant varieties that are drought stress tolerant is thereby a major pillar for buffering the effects of the on-going changes of regional and global climatic conditions. Predictive breeding methods have opened-up new avenues for wheat research and breeding for complex traits like drought stress tolerance. The usage of genome-wide distributed markers for conducting a genomic selection has thereby gained large popularity in applied breeding programs. Phenomic selection is on the other hand a recently developed method, which is similar to genomic selection but replaces molecular markers with information from near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS is already routinely used by cereal breeders to predict quality traits such as grain protein content, and since NIR spectra are influenced by the molecular composition of the analyzed samples they are furthermore able to capture genetic similarity between genotypes. Hence, they have the potential to be a high throughput and low-cost complement or alternative to molecular markers. In this project, we will develop an omics-based predictive breeding approach for breeding superior yielding drought stress tolerant bread wheat varieties using SNP marker and NIRS fingerprints. For this purpose, we will conduct dedicated drought stress trials in multiple locations and years, which will be used to develop multi-kernel omics-based prediction models, which interconnect the information from NIRS spectra with genotyping information from SNP Arrays as well as meteorological data for environtyping experimental sites. This will facilitate a more directed selection towards drought stress tolerance and consequently trait stability by predictive breeding technologies after completion of the project.
Project staff
Sebastian Michel
Dr. Sebastian Michel MSc.
sebastian.michel@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-97105
BOKU Project Leader
01.10.2023 - 30.09.2026
BOKU partners
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