Maize is a globally important cereal crop used extensively for food and animal feed, but its production is severely threatened by fungal pathogens, particularly Fusarium diseases. Among them, Fusarium stem rot (FSR) alone accounts for an estimated 4.5% loss in global maize yield and causes substantial quality degradation. In Central Europe, the most relevant causal agents include Fusarium graminearum, F. culmorum, and F. temperatum. European maize landraces represent valuable genetic resources for disease resistance, and the ability to generate double haploid (DH) lines in a single step enables the direct transfer of beneficial traits into elite breeding material.

This project focuses on assessing the genetic variation of DH lines derived from European landraces—specifically 200 lines from an Austrian landrace—across multiple environments and years. Field trials are conducted at two locations over two years, where a spore suspension is injected into maize stalks at flowering, followed by scoring the proportion of necrotized tissue at harvest. The goal is to identify associations between FSR resistance and SNP markers to enable genomic prediction of resistance without relying on labor-intensive phenotyping. This approach is especially valuable for breeding, as FSR resistance is quantitatively inherited, governed by many genes with environment-dependent effects, and has low heritability. Genomic selection, already established for other traits in maize, holds promise for efficiently improving resistance to FSR and enhancing the resilience of future maize varieties.