Tuesday, November 6, 2007 - 9:45 AM
177-2

The Barley Coordinated Agricultural Project (CAP): A Community-Wide, Genomics-Based Breeding Effort.

Gary Muehlbauer1, Barley CAP Consortium1, and Agoueb Consortium2. (1) 411 Borlaug Hall, 1991 Upper Buford, University of Minnesota, Univ. of Minnesota, Agronomy & Plant Genetics Dept., St. Paul, MN 55108, (2) Scottish Crop Research Institute, Invergowrie, United Kingdom

The barley coordinated agricultural project (CAP) is a community-wide, genomics-based approach to enhance barley breeding. The overall idea of this project is to genotype and phenotype breeding lines from U.S. barley breeding programs and to utilize the combined datasets to conduct association-based analysis to identify quantitative trait loci (QTL). The first phase of this project is to map 3,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) and develop an international genotyping platform composed of the 3,000 mapped SNPs. The SNP mapping is an international collaboration with the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) and is in the final stages. The second phase of the project will be to evaluate breeding lines from 10 U.S. barley breeding programs. A total of 3,840 advanced breeding lines will be evaluated. The SNP genotyping platform will be used to genotype the breeding lines at 3,000 loci. Over 40 traits will be examined including: agronomic, disease resistance, and food and malting quality. All data will be deposited in a centralized database called The Hordeum Toolbox. The database will facilitate haplotype analysis, association-based QTL detection, and germplasm exchange. To facilitate QTL detection, we are developing a software program called QTL Miner. Barley CAP collaborates closely with a sister Industry LINK project in the UK called AGOUEB. An update on the progress of the project will be presented.