SBIR-STTR Award

Gene transfer from wild relatives into crops (alien introgression) is of paramount importance to ensure food security under changing climate by efficiently utilizing natural variation. Because of the stringent homoeologous (related) chromosome pairing control exerted by the Ph1-like genes wild relative chromosomes do not pair or recombine with the crop homoeologs/orthologs resulting in 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 been developed in soybeans and other crops but that can't be directly used in breeding programs due to the unwanted alien linkage drag. Thus a targeted approach to temporarily induce homoeologous recombination is needed to obtain balanced alien gene transfers without any linkage drag. The team developed and validated such a method in wheat and Arabidopsis where homoeologous recombination was induced via transient silencing of C-Ph1 gene of wheat. During the Phase-I of NIFA-SBIR the team propose to validate and optimize this method in soybean by transferring key diseases resistance genes as trait of interest. Specific objectives of the proposed project 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 soybean backgrounds. The potential outcome of the project will include development and validation of a novel alien gene transfer method in soybean along with germplasm containing novel value-added genes transferred from alien species and the corresponding breeder-friendly DNA markers.