Ancient landraces provide novel genetic diversity for future breeding скачать в хорошем качестве

Ancient landraces provide novel genetic diversity for future breeding

Producing sufficient food in a changing world has become a key global challenge. Crops need to increase yields, use resources more effectively and be resilient to changing climates. Similar to other major crops, bottlenecks in the selection of barley varieties have resulted in reduction of genetic diversity, however landraces and wild barleys represent important sources of alleles to respond to abiotic and biotic stresses. Because there are very large ex situ collections available for barley, we can explore whether and to what extent adapted landraces and wild germplasm can contribute to future crop improvements. We presume that these landraces are already adapted to a wide range of environments and are thereby amenable to mining of useful variation. For barley, the resources that are critical to achieve this have been developed, and in this talk Dr Joanne Russell describes how we have used these to explore diversity and begin to understand the variation that underlies adaptive responses in barley. Dr Joanne Russell is a researcher in the Cereal Genetics Group at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee. Her career began with a Degree in Agricultural Botany at the University of Edinburgh and she then went to Cornell University for six years after which she returned to Scotland to undertake Post-Graduate studies at the Scottish Crop Research Institute, now called the James Hutton Institute. Her Phd concentrated on developing molecular markers to measure diversity in the tropical tree, Theobroma cacao (the Cocoa tree). Her current work focuses on cereals - especially barley. This talk was given online in 18 February 2021.