Public prebreeding program for wheat

Breeding strategy

Since more than one decade we run a prebreeding program for bread wheat with the aim to deliver lines, which are at the level of best commercial varieties for important agronomic and quality traits but carry 20-30% diversity from genetic resources. To our opinion, they cannot be directly commercialised but are interesting diverse crossing partners for private elite breeding programs, where they are more and more used. These lines are available upon request.

Roughly, we use a genomics assisted breeding approach. First, genetic resources are taken from differnet genebanks of the world or diverse breeding programs in other regions of the world. These resources are observed in Hohenheim and either genotyped or put into hybrid production with an elite tester to elaborate their genetic distance to German elite material and their breeding value to German elite material as described here. Interesting resources were used and crossed in a 4W cross to 3 different elite parents, which are strong in yield, disease resistance and quality. An intensive early generation selection on elite ideotype in F2-F4 is performed followed by 2-3 years yield testing and observation trials across several locations in Germany and France. At harvested samples we additionally investigate protein content, sedimentation volume, content of free asparagine as well as minerals. Additional, all lines are genotyped with the chip and their marker profiles are used to estimate the percentage of resource still present within each prebreeding line as well as to predict grain yield and sedimentation volume by genomic prediction. For the best F5 prebreeding lines with ideally high percentage of genetic resource, four sublines are multiplied and finally tested across several locations under conventional and organic field conditions. Data and lines are available upon request. For more details, please visit our youtube channel with detailed description of our strategy and a more practical view in the prebreeding program. A recent summary of that program was recently presented in this poster.