Location: Sunflower Improvement Research
Project Number: 3060-21000-047-020-N
Project Type: Non-Funded Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Apr 22, 2024
End Date: Apr 21, 2029
Objective:
(1) Understand how climate and phenology interact to determine sunflower yield and quality, including the role of phenological plasticity; (2) Characterize how variation in the network of hundreds of well-described genes in the flowering time pathway interact to shape phenology and fitness (3) Translate this enhanced understanding of the genetic and climate variables that shape fitness in field environments to guide crop breeding programs for a more sustainable, climate-resilient future.
Approach:
We will leverage five decades of field experiments from commercial variety trials in dozens of locations, along with a second two-decade dataset of the same phenotypic measurements from the only public sunflower breeding program in North America. This second dataset includes thousands of genotypes with whole genome shotgun data. The data will be integrated using ridge regression and physiological modelling. Candidate genes will be inferred from the ridge regression results, and gene network tools will allow us to develop flowering time pathway models.
