Work package 4: Novel breeding strategies and tools

Description

A unifying novelty implemented by work package 4 consisted of incorporating genetic knowledge about below-ground (root) traits, in the breeding strategies for yield adaptation under combined water and nitrogen stress of wheat and potato, as derived from the phenotyping efforts achieved in work package 2.

Novel tools such as molecular markers targeting these unconventional traits were developed and released to breeders and researchers. Novel wheat breeding strategies, strongly involving breeders and other stakeholders along the production chain, consisted of conducting genomic selection for bread and durum wheat on the one hand, and participatory, evolutionary breeding for durum wheat on the other hand.

For bread wheat and potato, designing hybrids was the third novel strategy developed in work package 4 to exploit heterosis for above- and below-ground traits involved in crop performance under combined stresses. This novel genetic material was used by other work packages, from controlled lab, semi-field or field conditions (work packages 2 and 3) to farmers' networks across Europe (work package 5), both in conventional and organic farming systems.

Objectives

Work package 4 aimed to develop novel breeding strategies and tools to improve crops to adapt to combined water and nutrient stresses, with the ambition to constitute general strategies that can be exploited in any other condition of multiple contemporary stresses. The specific objectives were to:

• Identify genetic associations between markers, below- and above-ground traits for yield adaptation to combined stresses (Task 4.1)
• Develop a genomic selection (GS) strategy for breeding of adaptation to combined stresses (Task 4.2)
• Develop an evolutionary participatory breeding strategy for yield adaptation to combined stresses in durum wheat (Task 4.3)
• Develop a strategy to design F1 hybrids in bread wheat and potato to cope with combined stresses (Task 4.4)