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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Ithaca, New York » Robert W. Holley Center for Agriculture & Health » Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research » Research » Research Project #434435

Research Project: Improving Crop Efficiency Using Genomic Diversity and Computational Modeling

Location: Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research

2018 Annual Report


Objectives
Objective 1: Create approaches and tools for identifying causal variants directly from genomic sequencing of diverse germplasm and species of C4 crops. [NP301, C1, PS1A] Objective 2: Identify deleterious mutations, and model their impact on crop efficiency and heterosis in C4 crops. [NP301, C3, PS3A] Objective 3: Identify adaptive variants for drought and temperature tolerance across C4 crops. [NP301, C1, PS1B] Objective 4: Establish community tools for processing and integration of sequence haplotypes to estimate their breeding effects in crop productivity. [NP301, C4, PS4A]


Approach
Increasing grass crop productivity is key for feeding the world over the next 50 years and this will require removing the deleterious variants in every genome, as well as adapting the crops to highly variable and stressful environments. This project will build better breeding models for improving and adapting maize and sorghum by surveying the natural variation across their entire group of wild relative species - the Andropogoneae. With over 1,000 species, the Andropogoneae are the most productive and water-use efficient plants in the world. Yet, for applied purposes, we have only tapped the variation from a handful of species. This project will lead an effort to survey DNA-level variation across this entire clade and analyze the variation with statistical and machine learning approaches. This will allow us to develop two sets of applied models for maize and sorghum. First, we will quantitatively estimate the deleterious impact on yield for every nucleotide in the genome. Second, we will identify the genes with a high capacity for adaptation to drought, flooding, temperature tolerance and their properties. These approaches and models will be deployed via integration with big data bioinformatics. This project will produce DNA-level knowledge that can be used across breeding programs and crops, and applied through either genomic selection or genome editing.


Progress Report
Since this project just began in March 2018, there is no significant progress to report. Please refer to the annual report for project 8062-21000-039-00D, titled, "Development and Application of Genetic, Genomic, and Bioinformatic Resources in Maize," for more information.


Accomplishments