Location: Plant Genetics Research
Project Number: 5070-21000-044-039-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2024
End Date: Aug 31, 2025
Objective:
Drought is the single greatest cause of soybean yield loss, and the incidence and severity of drought is expected to increase in coming decades. We have crossed plant introductions (PIs) with these favorable traits with an elite public parental line and developed multiple breeding populations containing the best possible alleles for multiple drought- associated traits. The goal of this research is to release germplasm that will serve to broaden the genetic base and deploy drought alleles in improved soybean genotypes that will provide valuable tools to commercial and public breeders and producers to meet the substantial challenges of increased incidence and severity of drought stress.
Approach:
Our previous research with USDA-GRIN lines with favorable drought associated traits crossed to elite public parental line resulted in creation of populations containing the best possible alleles for multiple drought-associated traits. We also intercrossed among our populations to generate Multi-parent Advanced Generation InterCross (MAGIC) genetic mapping populations specific for drought traits. We intend to identify and release soybean germplasm which will serve to broaden the genetic base and deploy drought alleles in improved soybean genotypes, as well as use our new materials for genetic mapping for traits associated with drought tolerance.
We have four main activities that will be used to meet these objectives:
1. Final collection of yield data for MAGIC-derived selections (G4F4:5) in multi- location trials.
2. Evaluation in 2025 of MAGIC population for four drought- traits, across two locations.
3. Development and refinement of trained genomic prediction models and genomic regions/candidate genes associated with drought tolerance.
4. Test and application of a cropping system model to predict the effects of deploying drought tolerance.
. Physiological and yield data will be collected by project partners with the required physiological/breeding expertise at remote field locations (Missouri, Arkansas).
Project partners have already and will continue to substantially share data collected and germplasm generated by this project. MWA-ARS and cooperator personnel carried out crossing efforts collaboratively and collectively in previous years of the project. All germplasm used was derived from either public germplasm (USDA-GRIN) or from USDA germplasm which was provided via MTAs to non-ARS partners.