Location: Cereal Crops Improvement Research
Project Number: 3060-21000-046-042-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 21, 2025
End Date: Aug 20, 2028
Objective:
The objective of this research is to continue the coordination of the USDA-ARS Oat Nursery for exchange of oat germplasm (advanced pure lines, varieties, and germplasm) containing genes and traits useful for participating oat breeding and genetic improvement programs.
Approach:
This project coordinates overall activities for the USDA Oat Nursery and is responsible for ensuring that germplasm exchange continues to enhance oat genetic resources available to breeding programs in North America and on a global basis. The coordinator serves as liaison between approximately 30 breeding programs to ensure collaboration in oat breeding and genetics. The project is responsible for developing, assembling, and distributing advanced breeding lines and segregating populations of elite or unique germplasm from and to collaborating oat breeders to enhance genetic gain and insure availability of essential genetic resources.
Contributions for the nursery will be solicited by the coordinator each year from collaborating breeders and nursery participants. Seed will be assembled in May each year and shipped to the USDA cooperator. The summer nursery will be grown in Aberdeen, Idaho each year to produce high quality, pure seed of entries for inclusion in the USDA Oat Nursery. The nursery will be composed of approximately 250 (200-300) entries each year. The nursery will include advanced pure lines (APLs) that are first-year entries in the USDA-ARS Uniform Early and Midseason Oat Nurseries. APLs in the nursery are intended for use by participating breeders as parents to create new segregating populations and the APLs can only be released as varieties with a signed intellectual property agreement with the originating breeder.
The summer nursery will be managed by USDA-ARS, in Aberdeen, ID. The USDA Oat Nursery coordinator (and project support staff) will visit the nursery each year in late August/early September for note-taking and harvest. Harvested rows will be threshed, packaged, and shipped to cooperators for subsequent processing and packaging. Cooperator will also coordinate collection of tissue samples from the Idaho nursery for DNA extraction and molecular analysis. Molecular data will be made available to nursery cooperators upon request and to other oat scientists with approval of the EC.
The USDA Oat Nursery will be packaged into about 34 sets of 250 entries each winter, with each set containing 6 grams of seed per entry. Shipping to collaborating breeders will begin in late January and continue through early summer. The USDA Oat Nursery coordinator will coordinate acquisition of necessary APHIS phytosanitary certificates for all USDA Oat Nursery shipments and will work with the requesting breeder to ensure that all necessary seed tests and assurances are completed for shipment. An archival set of each nursery will be stored at the USDA-ARS for a period of years to be determined by the Executive Committee (EC) of the USDA Oat Nursery. The material will be made available for research purposes.