Registration of ‘Choptank’ Wheat

‘Choptank’ (Reg. no. CV-976, PI 639724) is a soft red winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) that was jointly developed and released by the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station, Department of Natural Resource Sciences and Landscape Architecture, and the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station in 2004. Choptank is named after Maryland’s longest scenic river, which flows 70 miles from the western part of Delaware through Maryland and into the Chesapeake Bay, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Choptank has performed well in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware and provides growers with a high-yielding cultivar with short stature, excellent powdery mildew [caused by Blumeria graminis (DC.) E.O. Speer f. sp. tritici Em. Marchal] resistance and early heading date. Choptank was derived from the cross ‘Coker 9803’ (PI 548845)/‘Freedom’ (PI 562382) that was made in 1990 at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The population was advanced from the F2 to F5 generation using a modified bulk breeding method. Wheat spikes were selected in Virginia from the population in each generation (F2–F5) based on the absence of obvious disease, early maturity, short straw, and desirable head shape and size. Selected spikes were threshed in bulk and the seed was planted the following fall of each selection year. Spikes selected from the F5:6 bulk block were threshed individually and planted in separate headrows in the fall of 1996 at Beltsville, MD. Choptank was derived as a bulk of one of these F6:7 headrows selected in 1997 and assigned the breeding line designation MD11–52. In addition to high grain yield, Choptank was selected on the basis of earliness of head emergence, short plant height, and resistance to powdery mildew. Choptank was evaluated in the Maryland Wheat Variety Test for 5 yr (from 2000–2004), in the Virginia and Delaware State Wheat Variety Tests for 3 yr, and in the USDA-ARS Uniform Eastern and Uniform Southern Soft Red Winter Wheat Nurseries in 2004. Coleoptiles of Choptank are white. Juvenile plants exhibit a semierect growth habit. Plant color at boot stage (Feekes growth stage 9–10) is blue green and a waxy bloom is present on the stem and flag leaf sheath. Anther color is yellow. Spikes are tapering, middense, and awnletted. Glumes are long and wide, with oblique shoulders and obtuse beaks. Kernels of Choptank are red, soft, and ovate with a crease of medium width and depth, rounded cheeks, and a long noncollared brush. Choptank carries the 1BL.1RS wheat–rye chromosomal translocation. Head emergence of Choptank in Maryland is similar to that of ‘Sisson’ and 2 d earlier than Pioneer brand ‘25R37’. In Maryland, average plant height of Choptank (77.5 cm) is 5 cm shorter than that of Sisson and 2 cm shorter than that of USG ‘3209’. Average straw strength (0.0 lodging score) of Choptank in Maryland is similar to that of Sisson (0.3)

Assessing the Barley Genome Zipper and Genomic Resources for Breeding Purposes

The aim of this study was to estimate the accuracy and convergence of newly developed barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) genomic resources, primarily genome zipper (GZ) and population sequencing (POPSEQ), at the genome-wide level and to assess their usefulness in applied barley breeding by analyzing seven known loci. Comparison of barley GZ and POPSEQ maps to a newly developed consensus genetic map constructed with data from 13 individual linkage maps yielded an accuracy of 97.8% (GZ) and 99.3% (POPSEQ), respectively, regarding the chromosome assignment. The percentage of agreement in marker position indicates that on average only 3.7% GZ and 0.7% POPSEQ positions are not in accordance with their centimorgan coordinates in the consensus map. The fine-scale comparison involved seven genetic regions on chromosomes 1H, 2H, 4H, 6H, and 7H, harboring major genes and quantitative trait loci (QTL) for disease resistance. In total, 179 GZ loci were analyzed and 64 polymorphic markers were developed. Entirely, 89.1% of these were allocated within the targeted intervals and 84.2% followed the predicted order. Forty-four markers showed a match to a POPSEQ-anchored contig, the percentage of collinearity being 93.2%, on average. Forty-four markers allowed the identification of twenty-five fingerprinted contigs (FPCs) and a more clear delimitation of the physical regions containing the traits of interest. Our results demonstrate that an increase in marker density of barley maps by using new genomic data significantly improves the accuracy of GZ. In addition, the combination of different barley genomic resources can be considered as a powerful tool to accelerate barley breeding.Funding Agencies|German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [AZ 0315702]; Spanish Ministry for Science [EUI2009-04075]; Universidade da Coruna</p

CMS physics technical design report: Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

This report presents the capabilities of the CMS experiment to explore the rich heavy-ion physics programme offered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The collisions of lead nuclei at energies ,will probe quark and gluon matter at unprecedented values of energy density. The prime goal of this research is to study the fundamental theory of the strong interaction - Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) - in extreme conditions of temperature, density and parton momentum fraction (low-x). This report covers in detail the potential of CMS to carry out a series of representative Pb-Pb measurements. These include "bulk" observables, (charged hadron multiplicity, low pT inclusive hadron identified spectra and elliptic flow) which provide information on the collective properties of the system, as well as perturbative probes such as quarkonia, heavy-quarks, jets and high pT hadrons which yield "tomographic" information of the hottest and densest phases of the reaction.0info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe