Location: Hard Winter Wheat Genetics Research
Project Number: 3020-21000-012-024-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 3, 2025
End Date: Aug 31, 2027
Objective:
The objectives of this project are:
1. Maintain/expand Wheat Genetics Resource Center core germplasm collection, distribute euploid genetic resources through the USDA National Plant Germplasm System, and deposit associated phenotypic and genotypic data in a web-based database.
2. Mobilize genetic resources from the A-genome collection for wheat breeding pipelines.
3. Mobilize genetic resources of the tertiary gene pool collection of wheat.
4. Evaluate biological nitrification inhibition activity of accessions of Leymus racemosus and wheat lines carrying introgressions from L. racemosus, and mobilize genetic and genomic resources of ancient grains to introgress biological nitrification inhibition into wheat.
5. Discover and characterize novel traits in wheat with wild relative introgressions using conventional, high-throughput, and/or high-resolution phenotyping methods.
6. Continue to develop genomic resources to facilitate introgression of traits from wild relatives, trait mapping, and high-throughput markers for breeding.
Approach:
Wheat is a crop species critical to human nutrition worldwide. This research initiative focuses on acquiring, conserving, evaluating, and utilizing ancient crop plant ancestors to meet consumer demands and protect the global food supply. This initiative advances the use of ancient genetic variation among wheat ancestors in wheat breeding in order to increase wheat resilience to drought and heat stress, improve wheat resistance to critical insect and disease problems, and enhance the ability of wheat to meet consumer demands for healthful and palatable food. This research supports germplasm conservation and evaluation, utilization of existing and newly developed germplasm in breeding through seed production and distribution, genomic and phenotypic data collection, and data curation and analysis. The research also looks for germplasm that can be used to improve fertilizer use efficiency by inhibiting nitrification in soils. This research is central to an initiative incorporating public-sector (Land Grant University and USDA-ARS) scientists as well as private-sector scientists from the wheat breeding and wheat utilization industries who are industry members of an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC). Work packages supported by the industry-funded I/UCRC have contributed to the extensive curation of the germplasm collection with DNA sequence and phenotype information. New genetic resources also have been developed by the Cooperator and USDA-ARS based on this curation of the collection. The Industry Advisory Board of the I/UCRC provides feedback on research direction and progress at semi-annual meetings and ensures industrial relevance of the research direction.