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ARS Home Northeast Area Ithaca, New York Robert W. Holley Center for Agriculture & Health Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research Research





- Buckler, Edward - Ed
- 2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
- 2018
- Publications
- Plant Genetic Resources, Genomics and Genetic Improvement (301)

Research Project: **Location:
                            Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research** Project Number: 8062-21000-043-000-D
                        
                        Project Type: In-House Appropriated Start Date: Mar 1, 2018
                        
                        End Date: Feb 28, 2023 **Objective:**
                        
                        Objective 1: Create approaches and tools for identifying causal variants directly from genomic sequencing of diverse germplasm and species of C4 crops. [NP301, C1, PS1A]
Objective 2: Identify deleterious mutations, and model their impact on crop efficiency and heterosis in C4 crops.  [NP301, C3, PS3A]
Objective 3: Identify adaptive variants for drought and temperature tolerance across C4 crops.   [NP301, C1, PS1B]
Objective 4: Establish community tools for processing and integration of sequence haplotypes to estimate their breeding effects in crop productivity.  [NP301, C4, PS4A] **Approach:**
                        
                        Increasing grass crop productivity is key for feeding the world over the next 50 years and this will require removing the deleterious variants in every genome, as well as adapting the crops to highly variable and stressful environments. This project will build better breeding models for improving and adapting maize and sorghum by surveying the natural variation across their entire group of wild relative species - the Andropogoneae. With over 1,000 species, the Andropogoneae are the most productive and water-use efficient plants in the world. Yet, for applied purposes, we have only tapped the variation from a handful of species. This project will lead an effort to survey DNA-level variation across this entire clade and analyze the variation with statistical and machine learning approaches. This will allow us to develop two sets of applied models for maize and sorghum. First, we will quantitatively estimate the deleterious impact on yield for every nucleotide in the genome. Second, we will identify the genes with a high capacity for adaptation to drought, flooding, temperature tolerance and their properties. These approaches and models will be deployed via integration with big data bioinformatics.  This project will produce DNA-level knowledge that can be used across breeding programs and crops, and applied through either genomic selection or genome editing.


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