CRP on Dryland Cereals - DC

Overview: FP2 - Improved Varieties and Hybrids

FP1 - FP3


Leader Shoba Sivasankar, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics - ICRISAT

Team members: 55
Partner organizations: 38

Budget 2024
USD : 0

Clusters: 7

  Description
    
This Flagship includes crop- and region-specific projects focused on crop improvement for traits such as yield enhancement, yield stability, quality (food, feed and fodder), and resistance to pests, diseases and weeds, and addresses IDOs 1, 2, 3 and 5. Country-wise trait targets for dryland cereals breeding are listed in Annex 2, which represent ongoing and planned work for the chosen agro ecologies within these countries. While this listing is informed by the present understanding of target production systems, a refinement of these priority traits is a continuous activity. We will focus on those crop-trait combinations that will lead to significant impacts, both in the short term and the medium/longer term. In light of budget uncertainties, breeding-target priorities will be established for different potential levels of funding. Breeding programs that address sufficiently large numbers of genotypes evaluated across multiple environments are central to progress in crop improvement, through both conventional methods and modern genomic tools. Targeted development of genomic resources and testing sites will be undertaken in collaboration with international initiatives. The former includes sequencing of the finger millet genome, barley re-sequencing and the development of marker assays for breeding from available sequence information for each of the four crops. The genotyping data that is already available will be leveraged together with phenotyping data for genome-wide association studies, allele mining and marker identification, using new bioinformatics support through BMGF and CGIAR. We will also interact with the Integrated Breeding Platform for the development and implementation of breeding services for marker-assisted selection. Further, crop models will be calibrated for the different crops, target environments and management conditions in order to define target populations of environments and specific physiological parameters for breeding towards appropriate ideotypes. The establishment of methods for defining parental heterotic groups is critical for building distinct and complementary parental pools for effective and sustainable hybrid breeding. Analysis of combining ability and examination of genetic diversity for pertinent ranges of germplasm will be important outputs. The development and/or application of breeding technologies such as doubled haploid induction and genetic male sterility in elite parental lines will be useful for creating and exploiting genetic diversity. With the exception of barley, doubled-haploid systems are not currently available for dryland cereals. Haploid production in sorghum and pearl millet has remained difficult to date. We plan to evaluate a novel transgenic-mediated haploid-induction strategy in these crops by engineering centromeres that nucleate kinetochores, where the final haploid line will be non-transgenic. This Flagship will provide feedback information to Flagship 1, and knowledge and germplasm to FP3, FP4, and FP5.
  Key Documents
    
  Atlas
    
   Key Results
    
  Clusters
    
Code Cluster Name Leader Co-leader View
FP2-1 Sorghum-West Central Africa Aboubacar Toure
FP2-2 Pearl Millet-West Central Africa Malick Niango BA
FP2-3 Sorghum-East Southern Africa Eric Manyasa
FP2-4 Finger Millet-East Southern Africa Henry Fred Ojulong
FP2-5 Barley-Africa, Asia Ramesh Pal Singh Verma
FP2-6 Pearl Millet South Asia, East and Southern Africa SK Gupta
FP2-7 Sorghum South Asia Ashok Kumar Are
  Projects
    
Acronym Project Title Year Section Leader Center Budget Start Date End Date View
  Personnel Involved
    
  Partners