Frontier Scientific Inc. — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.130000000000001

Description

Gene transfer from wild relatives into crops (alien introgression) is of paramount importance toensure food security under changing climate by efficiently utilizing natural variation. Because ofthe stringent homoeologous (related) chromosome pairing control exerted by the Ph1-like geneswild relative chromosomes do not pair or recombine with the crop homoeologs/orthologs resultingin the transfer of whole chromosomes/arms or large segments that also carry unwanted traits(linkage drag). A large reservoir of pre-breeding material with alien introgression has beendeveloped in soybeans and other crops but that can't be directly used in breeding programs due todue to the unwanted alien linkage drag. Thus a targeted approach to temporarily inducehomoeologous recombination is needed to obtain balanced alien gene transfers without any linkagedrag. The team developed and validated such a method in wheat and Arabidopsis wherehomoeologous recombination was induced via transient silencing of C-Ph1 gene of wheat. Duringthe Phase-I of NIFA-SBIR the team propose to validate and optimize this method in soybean bytransferring key diseases resistance genes as trait of interest. Specific objectives of the proposedproject are: 1. Optimize VIGs based approach for gene silencing of meiotic genes in soybean. 2.Development of KASPar genotyping assays for to detect alien segments in cultivated soybeanbackgrounds. The potential outcome of the project will include development and validation of anovel alien gene transfer method in soybean along with germplasm containing novel value-addedgenes transferred from alien species and the corresponding breeder-friendly DNA markers.