Corn breeding service to improve disease resistance

Date:12-05-2014

Professional Seed Research Inc. (PSR) offers a breeding program to assist in improving resistance to specific diseases of corn.  Improving the disease resistance in a population before breeding increases probability that the resulting lines will have acceptable resistance. This increases the efficiency of all corn breeding techniques whether it’s traditional, dihaploid or Rapid Inbreeding®.

A breeding project involving a base F1 cross between a line susceptible to the Northern Leaf Blight fungus (Exserohilum turcicum) that otherwise has many favorable traits and a line that is more resistant could be selfed or sibbed to make an F2, segregating for polygenic resistance to this fungus. PSR would screen the F2 seed for resistance, select the most resistant (30-40% of plants), grow to maturity in the greenhouse and then return to you the F3 seed.  This program can also be applied to improving resistance to Goss wilt or avoiding susceptibility to race 1 of Bipolaris zeicola, causal agent for Northern Leaf Spot.

In conjunction with dihaploid and Rapid Inbreeding® programs, PSR could either cross the selected F2 plants with the haploid donor, returning this seed to the client, or PSR could apply Rapid Inbreeding® to the F3 seed in the summer and return new inbred lines after the summer season.

PSR Global Genetics LLC uses this same approach by applying Rapid Inbreeding® in developing new inbred lines from advanced populations.  The program produces thousands of inbred lines each year in only one generation.   “We have found that Rapid Inbreeding® works with all segregating populations, broad or narrow, tropical or temperate. Resulting lines usually have a little heterozygosity remaining allowing the breeder to tweak for minor characters yet immediately test for combining ability”, says Jim Dodd (CEO).