South Dakota winter wheat breeding program routinely develops winter wheat varieties under a 100% regenerative management system working closely with producers through on-farm trials. The main goal of the breeding program is to deliver hard winter wheat varieties with stable yield potential, good end-use quality, and resistance against disease and pests for the producers of South Dakota and the northern Great Plains. Fusarium head blight (FHB) followed by rust and Bacterial Leaf Streak are the major threats to sustainable wheat production in South Dakota. Breeding efforts for FHB resistance have successfully exploited native resistance. Over the years, SD winter wheat breeding program has released several winter wheat varieties like Lyman, Oahe, Winner, and Draper with above-average FHB resistance through conventional breeding focusing on phenotypic selection. Recently, we evaluated the potential of genomic selection in predicting FHB disease index (DIS) and Fusarium damaged kernels (FDK) in the early generation breeding lines using advanced breeding lines as training populations. We observed moderate prediction accuracy of up to 0.59 for DIS and 0.54 for FDK, demonstrating the promise in genomic prediction for FHB resistance in earlier generations using advanced lines. Further to increase the frequency of Fhb1+Sr2, Fhb6, and Fhb1+2DL in SD breeding materials, we are coupling marker-enrichment with rapid generation advancement.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND DISCLAIMER
This
material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
under Agreement No. 59-0206-0-177. This is a cooperative project with the U.S. Wheat &
Barley Scab Initiative. Any opinions,
findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are
those of the author(s) and do not
necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture