GENOMICS-ASSISTED BREEDING OF MALTING BARLEY FOR NEW YORK STATE
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Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) has been the primary ingredient in brewing for millennia. Recent increases in demand for local malting barley production outside of western North America for craft brewing and distilling have created a need for new varieties adapted to humid continental climates. Malting quality can be negatively affected by several seed pathogens and preharvest sprouting (PHS) in regions with wet conditions during the growing season. Genomics-assisted breeding methods, including genomic prediction and genome-wide association, have the potential to improve selection accuracy and reduce breeding cycle time to increase rates of genetic gain. My goals were to apply genomics-assisted breeding methods to address malting barley production challenges in the northeastern United States. Specific objectives included 1) examining the genetic architecture and environmental stability of the seed dormancy 2 (SD2) locus to determine if tight linkage or pleiotropy is responsible for negative correlations between PHS and malting quality, 2) studying the genetic relationships between PHS, seed dormancy, and seed germination rate to identify germplasm with PHS resistance and good malting quality, 3) exploring strategies to enhance genomic prediction accuracy in a newly established spring barley breeding program, 4) evaluating the merits of a genomic selection approach using a selection index in a newly established breeding program, and 5) releasing a two-row spring malting barley variety with disease resistance, PHS resistance, and good malting quality for local growers. The key findings of this research are 1) three functional alleles of HvMKK3 are the primary determinants of PHS resistance and seed dormancy at SD2 and HvGA20ox1 does not have an effect on these traits, 2) HvMKK3 and HvAlaAT1 are sensitive to environmental conditions and together explain a substantial portion of annual PHS variation, 3) a connected half-sib training population increases within and across family prediction accuracy and is highly powered for genome-wide association studies, 4) genomic selection using a selection index resulted in significant gain for highly weighted traits but retained genetic variance for lightly weighted traits, and 5) a new two-row spring barley variety, ‘Excelsior Gold’, was released as a result of these combined efforts
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Bergstrom, Gary Carlton