Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference

January 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Use Of High Throughput Marker Technologies For Marker-Assisted Breeding In Wheat And Barley

Shiaoman Chao¹ , James Anderson² , Karl Glover³ , Kevin Smith²

¹  USDA-ARS Biosciences Research Lab, 1605 Albrecht Blvd, Fargo, ND 58105

²  Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108

³  Plant Science Department, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57007

The benefits of using molecular markers for crop improvement have been reported frequently. However, the widespread application of marker-assisted selection (MAS) in wheat and barley is limited. This is primarily due to the lack of robust molecular markers found closely associated with agronomic traits having complex inheritance and of the high throughput genotyping techniques required to screen a large number of samples. The establishment of four regional USDA-ARS genotyping centers in the US is expected to play an increasingly important role to facilitate MAS in small grains improvement. We have initiated a pilot study in an attempt to establish a cost-effective high throughput genotyping protocol to enhance wheat and barley breeding efforts in selecting and releasing lines resistant to Fusarium head blight (FHB). The inheritance of FHB resistance is complex, and robust DNA markers have been identified and tagged to a few major resistance genes in both wheat and barley. For the hard red spring wheat breeding programs at Minnesota, F2's and F3's from selected populations carrying the Qfhs.ndsu-3BS QTL plus other FHB QTL or HMW glutenins segregating in the populations were screened. The hard red spring wheat breeding program at South Dakota employed backcross to transfer FHB QTLs of Sumai 3 origin to elite wheat cultivars. The MAS was carried out for the F2 individuals carrying FHB QTLs on chromosomes 2H and 6H from the 6-rowed spring barley breeding programs at Minnesota. The details regarding the breeding strategies and implementation of MAS will be reported.