BARLEY BIODIVERSITY - Increasing biodiversity and productivity of barley cultivars using a sensor-based high-throughput phenotyping system in the field and association mapping with two wild barley introgression libraries (BMBF-IPAS project)

Enhancing crop biodiversity is one key component to cope with current challenges in agricultural production. These challenges are partly due because of climate change effects, resulting in increased incidences of abiotic stresses (e.g. drought and mineral deficiency) and biotic stresses (e.g. pathogen attacks and animal pests) and, for several reasons, because application of fertilizers, namely nitrogen and phosphate, are likely to be more restricted in future. Many studies have proven that exotic germplasm contain a wealth of alleles useful for modern agriculture that are absent from the cultivated gene pool. The need to utilize the available exotic diversity in plant breeding is particularly acute for genes regulating adaptation to biotic and abiotic stresses. In addition, innovative technologies are now available, namely non-invasive hyperspectral imaging, which enable plant breeders to study plant development and plant quality at low cost.

We intend to demonstrate the high value of both innovations, i.e. utilization of exotic introgression libraries and hyperspectral imaging, for plant breeding under conventional as well as low input agricultural practice. For this, we will utilize two exotic spring barley introgression libraries, developed by the Pillen lab and the AGROVER hyperspectral imaging system, patented by the Fraunhofer IFF as a model. The exotic barley libraries consist of a set of 73 wild barley introgression lines, named S42ILs, which were genotypically and phenotypically characterized in order to increase biodiversity in barley and identify exotic alleles that exert trait improving effects for a multitude of agronomic traits. Recently, also the multiparental exotic introgression population HEB-25, consisting of 1,500 nested-association mapping (NAM) lines has been developed in in the Pillen lab. HEB-25 is currently under genetic and phenotypic characterization in order to increase biodiversity in barley and to identify trait improving exotic alleles for various agronomic traits.
The second innovation, tested in the consortium, is the AGROVER hyperspectral imaging system, which may be applied in plant breeding programs to collect hyperspectral field data, subsequently, processed by mathematical modeling to predict plant growth, yield and quality in high spatial and temporal resolution.