Taking barley both as a target and a model, BARISTA will deliver new breeding strategies and toolkits for boosting crop improvement, leading to new, high-yielding varieties selected to cope with anticipated future climatic conditions.
BARISTA is built on extensive phenotypic and genotypic data generated in previous projects and on current understanding of the genetics of ideotype traits for biotic and abiotic stress resilience. The consortium will work on a common set of unique germplasm and will drive genomic prediction (GP) and crop simulation models (CSMs) in combination to improve current predictive breeding tools and methods. In addition, BARISTA will dissect traits relevant for barley sustainability and resilience (e.g., water- and nitrogen-use efficiency, culm architecture, disease resistance, flowering time) by using state of the art phenotyping, genetics, and genomics methodologies.
BARISTA will predict which new combinations of alleles are required for future climate scenarios in different target environments, validate models and provide a toolkit for breeding for climate change, and design optimal cross combinations to enhance breeding for specific target environments.
BARISTA is developing and testing genomic prediction (GP) and crop simulation models (CSMs) to improve the efficiency of barley breeding for key traits relevant for sustainability and resilience: water- and nitrogen-use efficiency (WUE, NUE), culm architecture to improve lodging resistance, disease resistance and flowering time. For each trait, BARISTA is developing an innovative approach linking genomic variation with crop model parameters to identify the alleles controlling the optimal expression of the traits and make predictions on best allele combinations required for future climate scenarios in different target environments.
After about one and half year of work, BARISTA has selected lines with improved WUE, lines with increased culm diameter with potential impact on lodging resistance, lines stacking candidate genes conferring quantitative resistance against a range of barley pathogens and is progressing on GP and CSMs.
*At the time of the proposal. Please consider this data as an accurate estimate; it may vary during the project’s lifespan.
Total costs include in kind contribution by grant holders and can therefore be higher than the total requested funding.