Location: Cereal Crops Improvement Research
Project Number: 3060-21000-046-049-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 1, 2026
End Date: Jul 31, 2028
Objective:
Washington State and the greater Inland pacific Northwest experiences heat and drought events during grain fill that negatively impact barley yield and quality. Since the majority of Washington State’s barley is grown on dryland in a three-year rotation with winter wheat and a legume profitability for growers requires abiotic stress resistance against untimely high heat and drought in all three crops. The main objective of this cooperative research is to identify and genetically characterize genes/loci that contribute to heat and drought tolerance in spring and winter barley genotypes. Once effective new sources of abiotic stress resistances have been identified and characterized from adapted parental materials, experimental germplasm, world barley core collections and the wild barley diversity collection we will begin the process of introgressing these genes/loci into elite barely genotypes for the development of varieties adapted to the dryland growing regions of the inland Pacific Northwest. Here we will characterize these gene regions to fulfill the following objectives:
OBJECTIVES
Objective 1: Identify stable and high yielding spring and winter barley genotypes from elite WSU germplasm
Objective 2: Utilize the spring barley core collection to conduct GWAS analyses to identify loci positively contributing to agronomic performance under heat and drought stress in dryland systems
Objective 3: Select and genotype a winter barley diversity panel to begin assaying for agronomic traits and peroxisomal and autophagic pathways that putatively contribute to heat and drought resilience utilizing GWAS analyses.
Approach:
Objective 1: To evaluate experimental genotypes for broad adaptability, 20 high yielding advanced spring and 20 high yielding advanced winter barley lines pre-selected under drought and high heat growing conditions will be evaluated across three environments (high, medium, and low precipitation zones) over three cropping seasons. The study will quantify grain yield stability, and contribution of genotype, and genotype by environment interaction components. Additive Main Effect and Multiplicative Interaction and Genotype plus Genotype-by-Environment biplot analysis will be utilized. These multivariate models, including principal component analysis, will identify stable, high-yielding genotypes.
Objective 2: A spring barley mini core collection will be utilized for GWAS analyses providing quick access to genetic diversity lost during the development of modern varieties where selection under optimized conditions led to genetic sweeps resulting in loss of alleles that positively contribute to increased agronomic traits under less-than-optimal growing conditions. Utilizing the barley mini core collection will allow us to conduct GWAS analyses to identify barley loci positively contributing to agronomic performance under heat and drought stress in dryland systems which we hypothesize to include peroxisomal and autophagic pathways. A rapid and efficient method that uses a small fluorescent dye Nitro-BODIPY (N-BODIPY), which exhibits low background fluorescence and becomes activated inside peroxisomes as evident by fluorescence microscopy will be used for phenotyping. Peroxisomes contain many ROS scavenging enzymes, and the abundance of these ROS-scavengers makes peroxisomes a key organelle essential for plant survival under abiotic stress conditions including high heat and drought. We will also utilize the N-BODIPY phenotyping and the Wild Barley Diversity Collection pangenome sequencing data to run additional GWAS. These data will facilitate selection of genotypes and parental material that are well adapted to dryland farming systems under heat and drought conditions contributing to broad adaptability and resilience in dryland production systems.
Objective 3: Select and genotype (50 K Illumina SNP chip) a winter barley diversity panel containing WSU experimental lines, named varieties from other programs, Turkish lines obtained with heat and drought resistance, and diverse world barley core collection lines. Plant out winter barley diversity panel to begin assaying for agronomic traits and peroxisomal and autophagic pathways that putatively contribute to heat and drought resilience which will be utilized for GWAS analyses.