WHEALBI: Wheat and barley legacy for breeding improvement; A EU-FP7 Project to link genomics and agronomy

Book of abstracts p. 203WHEALBI is granted 5 M€ by EU-FP7 (Grant no 613 556) for 5 years starting January, 2014.It involves 18 partners (8 academics, 7 industry /SME) in 9 countries and aims at improvingEuropean wheat and barley production in competitive and sustainable cropping systems.Germplasm will be selected and characterised by next-generation-sequencing. Adaptive traitswill be evaluated in both transnational field experiments and precision phenotyping platforms.Germplasm will be stored in a bio-repository and associated data in knowledge bases that willrepresent a valuable legacy to the community. Whole genome association scans will beconducted for several traits, signatures of adaptive selection will be explored, and allelemining of candidate genes will reveal new variation associated with specific phenotypes. Prebreedingtools will be developed to optimize the efficiency of allele transfer from unadaptedgermplasm into elite breeding lines. New methodologies will explore how to optimally exploitthe large amount of new genotypic and phenotypic data available. Ideotypes with improvedyield stability and tolerance to biotic and climatic stresses will be evaluated in innovativecropping systems, particularly organic farming and no-till agriculture, and an economicevaluation will be conducted. Results will be disseminated to a broad user community,highlighting the benefits and issues associated with the adoption of sustainable wheat andbarley crop production.In 2015, WHEALBI has produced significant achievements in several ways. First of all,exome sequence of 512 barley and 512 wheat accessions covering the range of geneticdiversity have been produced. These raw data are currently being processed (cleaning, qualitycontrol, SNP calling) to be released to WHEALBI partners in early 2016. As an evidence ofthe value of these data, we already received demands from several consortia to have access,which will be effective soon after first exploitation within WHEALBI. These 1024 accessionshave also been planted in the field, at 7 locations for each species, spanning over Europe fromScotland to Turkey. This will allow a comprehensive study of adaptation to a wide range ofclimatic conditions, and exome data will give insights into its genetic components.In 2016, exome polymorphism will also be “mined” to explore the genetic bases of keyadaptive traits, and used in statistical models to improve genetic dissection breedingefficiency, as illustrated by the 1000 bulls genome project(http://www.1000bullgenomes.com). A smaller collection of diverse barley and wheatvarieties will also be studied in innovative, more sustainable cropping systems, includingorganic, to anticipate the needs of future European Agriculture

WHEALBI: Wheat and barley legacy for breeding improvement; A EU-FP7 Project to link genomics and agronomy

Book of abstracts, p. 108WHEALBI: Wheat and barley legacy for breeding improvement; A EU-FP7 Project to link genomics and agronomy. Recent progress in drought tolerance: from genetics to modellin