RESEARCH TOPICS FOR XXXVIII CYCLE – Selection procedure for one position with grant on the specific topic “Innovation in durum wheat breeding”
Title of the Research Topic: Innovation in durum wheat breeding
1 (one) position with grant funded by Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria - Centro di Ricerca Cerealicoltura e Colture Industriali (CREA-CI)
Scientific Tutor: Prof. Nicola Pecchioni
Research topic:
The urgent need to enhance Durum wheat yield sustainably by breeding is due to climate change and food security demands. To move forward actual plant breeding gains in durum wheat the development of innovations, together with deeper “on-the-go” knowledge of genetic control of complex and key simple traits are necessary. At CREA Research Centre for Cereal and Industrial Crops a durum wheat Nested Association Mapping (NAM) population has been recently developed. NAM is an integrated multi-parent approach that combines the advantages of linkage mapping and association mapping for high resolution and high-power mapping of complex traits, as for weighting of allelic and other genetic variation effects on the desired traits. Thanks to the availability of high density genotyping platforms, including the NGS approaches, the present project aims to accelerate the utilization of the durum wheat NAM population. This will be used for prediction of genomic estimated breeding value and genomic assisted selection in an improvement program, in parallel to discovery of the effects of different genetic and genomic sources of variation on the most important traits, for grain yield and environmental sustainability of the crop. For a successful realization of the project, the candidate will spend a period of at least 6 months in foreign research institution(s) where he/she could develop further knowledge in plant breeding innovations.