This is a large European Collaboration that builds upon the strong links already established via BarleyNet. It involves partners from The University of Bonn, MTT Agrifood Research Finland, IPK Gatersleben, Experimental Institute for Cereal Research, Fiorenzuola d'Arda Experimental Institute for Cereal Research, Fiorenzuola d'Arda, Royal Veterinary AgricultureUniversity in Copenhagen and University of Dundee.

The central goal of this project is to establish an incremental association mapping approach based on different population types for the discovery of new gene alleles in wild barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. spontaneum), which can be exploited for crop breeding. The foundations for this study are three populations of barley germplasm, namely 460 H. vulgare cultivar collection representing modern and old European cultivars; a collection of 480 landraces from the Fertile Crescent and a Hordeum spontaneum collection assembled by Brian Steffenson (University of Minnesota).

Figure: Glasshouse trials of Hordeum vulgare (HVCC), landrace (LRC), and Hordeum spontaneum (HSCC) collections.

Our approach will build upon the strong genomics base of barley and will apply association genetics concepts pioneered in humans and Arabidopsis to test the efficiency of the association genetics approach for identifying gene alleles in Hordeum that are needed by the breeder. All of the accessions will be scored in this project for particular phenotypic traits relevant to new and established end uses, quality, sustainablility and morphological development parameters, across several locations and years.

The collections will also be genotyped, by the high throughput Illumina marker system and gene sequencing, maximising the strengths of these approaches. Association analysis will then be performed between the phenotype and genotype data sets to identify broad genomic regions containing potentially useful gene alleles for the traits of interest.