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ARS Home » Plains Area » Fargo, North Dakota » Edward T. Schafer Agricultural Research Center » Cereal Crops Improvement Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #417963
Research Project: Improvement of Disease and Pest Resistance in Barley, Durum, Oat, and Wheat Using Genetics and Genomics

Location: Cereal Crops Improvement Research

Title: Leveraging historical trials to predict Fusarium head blight resistance in wheat breeding programs

Author
item BRAULT, CHARLOTTE - University Of Minnesota
item CONLEY, EMILY - University Of Minnesota
item GREEN, ANDREW - North Dakota State University
item GLOVER, KARL - South Dakota State University
item COOK, JASON - Montana State University
item GILL, HARSIMARDEEP - University Of Minnesota
item Read, Andrew
item Fiedler, Jason
item ANDERSON, JAMES - University Of Minnesota

Submitted to: The Plant Genome
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/2/2025
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: Fusarium head blight is a fungal disease that poses a major threat in wheat and barley. Plant breeding to improve the genetic resistance of commercial cultivars is an important tool to defeat the disease and decrease risk for producers. In this study, we coupled the disease rating values from the long-running ARS Uniform Regional Nursery and Uniform Regional Scab Nursery with genome information of the lines to build statistical models that help us predict several traits related to disease resistance. Exploring several different parameters for model-building, including the number of lines, the characteristics of the lines and the genome data, we fine-tuned a system that was able to accurately predict performance of new breeding material. Proper leverage of this public information to assist individual breeding programs will help them improve lines faster and ultimately provide producers with superior varieties that can natively combat this disease in the field.

Technical Abstract: Fusarium head blight (FHB, also called scab) is a fungal disease posing a major threat in wheat and barley. Plant breeding associated with genotyping is a key lever to improve the genetic resistance of commercial cultivars. The uniform regional scab nursery (URSN) is a historical nursery created in 1995 with several public breeding programs to improve genetic resistance in hard red spring wheat. So far, data from this nursery has not been extensively studied. We gathered phenotypic and genotypic from this nursery, as well as from two current breeding programs in the U.S Midwest. We applied genomic prediction on 8 traits related to FHB and agronomic traits, and studied the effects of statistical method, marker density, training set size, genetic structure and genetic architecture of the trait. Using the URSN population, we found that RKHS was the best method in various prediction settings, with an average accuracy of 0.63, marker density could be as low as 500 without decreasing much the prediction accuracy and training set optimization was useful for two traits. Furthermore, we predicted genotypic values in breeding programs using the URSN population as a training set with various prediction scenarios. Predicting unrelated populations led to a significant decrease in accuracy, but with encouraging values for some traits and population. Ultimately, when progressively decreasing the number of lines from breeding populations in the training set, the advantage of adding the URSN population was more pronounced, with difference in accuracy up to 0.066.