Location: Forage Seed and Cereal Research Unit
Project Number: 2072-21500-001-015-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2025
End Date: Sep 30, 2026
Objective:
The primary objective is to produce barley germplasm and potential varieties with value to stakeholders. While the primary value-added trait is malting quality, malting barley varieties must be resistant to the Ug99 stem rust pathogen and other important diseases including Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus, scald, and stripe rust, in addition to exhibiting superior winterhardiness. The project aims to document and understand disease resistance, winterhardiness, and malting quality genetically and phenotypically, as well as to develop improved germplasm that is made available to interested cooperators.
Approach:
The approach will involve continued characterization of identified sources of Ug99 stem rust resistance – notable in the ‘Woody-1’ and ‘Woody-2’ germplasm, among others. These materials will be crossed with winter, facultative, and spring germplasm possessing biotic and abiotic stress resistance as well as superior agronomic performance and end-use quality in order to develop bi-parental and genome-wide association study genetic mapping populations. Doubled haploids and/or recombinant inbred lines will be produced and selected from these cross combinations. The results of the Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus (BYDV) validation population will be reported through submission to a peer-reviewed publication. Marker assays for the BYDV resistance loci on chromosome 2H will be developed for application in other barley breeding populations. The validation population will be phenotyped for BYDV for an additional year to discover genes associated with resistance to stripe rust, scald, and other diseases, as well as to develop a protocol for detecting BYDV symptoms using high-throughput phenotyping. The population and other germplasm will additionally be leveraged to explore the genetic basis of low temperature tolerance, vernalization sensitivity, physical characteristics of the grain, and malting quality. The results of long-read sequencing of five barley genotypes, including chromosome scale assemblies, will be reported through submission to a peer-reviewed publication, with a specific emphasis on describing the genes associated with low temperature tolerance, vernalization sensitivity, and resistance to disease, including the novel Ug99 stem rust and stripe rust resistance in the ‘Woody-1’ and ‘Woody-2’ germplasm. The resulting germplasm and generated data will be made available to interested cooperators for additional testing, analysis, gene discovery, and cooperative release for commercial production.