Maize is an important cereal worldwide, serving as animal feed and food in many countries. However, fungal pathogens pose a significant threat to global production. European maize landraces are valuable resources for detecting disease resistance. The ability to generate double haploids (DH) in one step allows valuable traits to be transferred directly from landraces into elite breeding material. Fusarium stem rot (FSR) reduces maize production worldwide by about 4.5 % and also leads to considerable quality losses. In the project, the genetic differences between 250 DH lines from European landraces will be recorded at several locations and years and the association between FSR resistance and SNP markers will be investigated to predict FSR resistance using genomics, ultimately without the need of phenotyping. This is particularly important for breeding, as the detection of stem rot is very time-consuming, cost-intensive and, compared to other traits, relatively error-prone. Resistance is quantitatively inherited and is caused by many genes, which often show an environment-dependent effect. Especially for such low-heritability traits, genomic prediction and selection should be advantageous. |
