Evaluation of wild barley introgression lines for agronomic traits related to nitrogen fertilization

Abstract

In the coming decades, climate change and resources constraints will make profitable and economically reliable agriculture more and more challenging. To evaluate the potential of exotic alleles to maintain performance under low nitrogen input, we investigated a set of 41 introgression lines (S42ILs) originating from the hybridization of the German spring barley 'Scarlett' and the Israeli wild barley 'ISR42-8'. These lines were assessed in field trials for yield, yield components, grain protein content and chlorophyll content during growing seasons 2015 and 2016 in two different test sites in Germany under low and high nitrogen supply levels, N 0 and N 1 . Our analyses revealed 17 regions for putative quantitative trait loci (QTL), linked to one or multiple traits, across all chromosomes. In particular, lines S42IL_119 and S42IL_121 exhibited an enhanced thousand grain weight of 7% and 9% under N 1 and N 0 , respectively. In addition, six QTL were found for grain number per ear leading to a decline of grain number of up to 20%. Furthermore, three new QTL for chlorophyll content could be identified on chromosomes 1H and 2H. The present study revealed QTL effects of wild barley introgressions in a spring barley elite background, especially under low nitrogen. The selection for nitrogen efficient lines with beneficial exotic alleles represents the first step towards the development of spring barley cultivars genetically adapted to nitrogen limitations.

Detection and Verification of QTL for Salinity Tolerance at Germination and Seedling Stages Using Wild Barley Introgression Lines

“…The significant differences, which were observed among treatments and for G by T interactions, referred to the obvious effect of salt stress on the tested genotypes, which responded differently to the levels of salt concentration. Such differences have been observed for the same group of S42ILs under different environmental conditions such as drought and nutrient deficiency [21,35,[37][38][39]47]. Moreover, this noticeable variation among the genotypes in the current study was reflected through the high estimates of broadsense heritability under salinity conditions in the current study.…”

“…The current study aimed at detecting QTL effects of the exotic alleles in a set of 50 ILs carrying ISR42-8 introgressions in the Scarlett background to salinity tolerance at germination and seedling phases. Since the wild barley accession ISR42-8 contains detrimental alleles for both agronomic and adaptive traits, the S42 population and its ILs displayed transgression segregations for these traits under control and adverse conditions, referring to presence of the valuable alleles in the wild gene pool [34][35][36][37][38][39][40].…”

Evaluation of RGB and Multispectral Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Imagery for High-Throughput Phenotyping and Yield Prediction in Barley Breeding

“…The subsequent genotype association study with the predicted yield data could only detect significant lines in IPK. Six of the nine significant lines detected in the YLD GT data correspond to Zahn et al [80]. The overlap of detected significant lines between YLD GT and the multispectral dataset increases with higher r 2 and false positives were only detected between the beginning and the middle phase of the vegetation period, indicating that increasing prediction accuracy reduces false positive detections.…”

“…The S42IL library was derived by an initial cross between the spring barley cultivar "Scarlett" and the Israeli wild barley accession ISR42-8 [71], followed by three rounds of backcrossing with "Scarlett" and marker assisted selection which is described by Schmalenbach et al [72]. The S42IL population was conventionally phenotyped in multiple genotype association studies to identify significant introgression lines for plant height [73][74][75], early vigor [76], drought stress [70,[77][78][79], and yield [80], which can be used comparatively for sensor-assisted phenotyping in this study.…”

Organic farming - Deep genotyping reveals specific selection footprints in barley populations

“…Both organically and conventionally farmed populations can bene t from the genetic diversity of distinct WT alleles (Supplementary Table 5, 6). ISR42-8, which was used as the WT donor, was reported to have an expanded root system 41 , increased drought tolerance [42][43][44] , increased seed and ear length and kernel weight 45 , reduced thresh-ability 46 , reduced plant height 41 , late owering 47 , enhanced biotic stressor resistance genes [48][49][50] and ear brittleness 46 .…”