Project Number: 5366-21000-029-03
Project Type: Reimbursable

Start Date: Feb 01, 2011
End Date: Jan 31, 2014

Objective:
The overall goal of the 'T-CAP' project is to phenotype and genotype diverse and designed germplasm pools to mine and deploy alleles that improve barley and wheat adaptation and performance under biotic and abiotic stress,and couple these activities with the training of a new generation of plant breeders. Specific objectives for the work at Aberdeen, ID are 1) Evaluate NSGC accessions from the core collection for nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) and water-use efficiency (WUE)in cooperation with University of Idaho colleagues. 2) Evaluate barley lines in an association mapping panel for yield, NUE, and WUE in the field at Aberdeen.

Approach:
Within the overall T-CAP project, three teams of experienced barley and wheat breeders will provide standardized field-based evaluations of WUE, NUE, and yield. Physiologists will develop high through put phenotyping methods for drought, heat and NUE. The generated datasets will be used to identify valuable alleles for these traits and to deploy them using MAS and GS approaches. The project will use available Illumina SNP platforms to genotype the complete barley (2,571 accessions) and wheat (5,490 accessions) core NSGC collections. We will also phenotype the complete core collections for stem, leaf and stripe rust and other important pathogens. A subset of 2,000 accessions will be screened in year one for abiotic stresses using 20 nurseries grouped by height and heading time. Promising lines (600) will be characterized in more detailed experiments in years 2 to 5. Based on the phenotypic and genotypic data, subsets capturing the genetic diversity in the NSGC collection will be crossed with elite varieties to generate nested association mapping (NAM) and other segregating populations for evaluation in years 4 and 5.