Location: Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research
Project Number: 2050-21000-038-021-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2024
End Date: Oct 31, 2025
Objective:
Seed protein content is an important trait for both malting and food barley industries. The overall objectives are to specifically edit a regulatory gene related to cereal seed protein content and to apply the new meristem-based transformation system to the Golden Promise variety.
Approach:
Apply a new barley meristem transformation system to Golden Promise which is a variety of two-row spring barley and widely used for barley transformation. Under the agreement, the WCIC will provide administrative, scientific, and technical staff to build suitable vectors, conduct transformation and molecular detection of transgenes for recovering fertile plants from barley meristems that will increase the efficiency and speed of the overall process compared to the existing immature embryo methodology. ARS will provide seeds of Golden Promise for which transformation systems are desired. It is anticipated that significant progress can be made over one year period but can be extended based on the experimental needs. The tissue culture and transformation methodologies will be conducted by following the protocols developed by Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center. Experiments will generate data suitable for publication in peer-reviewed journals. The generated plants will be evaluated with the molecular markers targeting the selection marker gene. The real transgenic plants will be maintained in the greenhouse at Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center to harvest seeds and for phenotypic investigation.
