Location: Soybean and Nitrogen Fixation Research
Project Number: 6070-21220-070-073-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2024
End Date: Sep 30, 2025
Objective:
Germplasm and cultivar development: a) Develop and release drought-resilient germplasm and high yielding varieties.
Improve drought screening and selection.
Approach:
The collaborator will evaluate high-yielding commercial varieties from private programs under drought stress conditions for seed yield and slow wilting. The focus will be on MG III through V varieties.
The collaborator will develop adapted breeding lines which possess drought tolerance. Multiple crosses will be made each year to incorporate drought tolerance traits into Maturity Groups 3, 4 and 5 elite germplasm. Winter nursery facilities will be used to reduce cycle time. Progeny from twenty-five, single cross populations involving drought resistant parents (for example: R10-2346, R10-2436, R10-2622, N10-7404, and N05-7432) will be evaluated in replicated field plots in FY25. Each year we will develop 15 to 20 additional populations involving drought tolerant lines and high yielding, elite varieties. Lines will be evaluated in both dryland and irrigation conditions in KS and screened for the slow-wilting phenotype. Following two years of yield evaluations in irrigated and dryland environments in KS, superior lines will be entered into the USDA Regional Preliminary trials or the Drought Uniform Trials. For FY25, the focus will be on maturity groups IV and V for evaluation in irrigated and dryland trials in three of four states.
The Cooperator will continue to build on their efforts to use remote sensing technology to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying superior breeding material tolerant to drought. This will include both spectral and thermal monitoring of the soybean canopy. Also, the collaborator will use our drought breeding populations to test and further develop our genomic selection program to improve selection models based on training population data (phenotypes, i.e. yield, wilting, remote sensing data, etc.) and weather data using breeding material developed by our program and evaluated in KS environments.
