Consider the roots: examining barley belowground in the search for adaptation

Abstract

Barley is important for global food security and sustaining the economically valuable malt industry. Montana is a top barley producer in the United States, but terminal drought stress poses a significant threat to this production by negatively impacting yield and quality. New crop varieties with enhanced environmental adaptation and soil resource extraction would help address this and other issues facing modern agriculture. Stay-green is a trait that extends grain fill in cereals and can stabilize yield and quality under drought. However, this trait and its benefits can be inconsistent across environments and its successful incorporation into breeding strategies would benefit from expanded understanding of stay-green. Roots may play a role in stay-green physiology. Roots provide plants with the water and nutrients needed for growth and are important for crop performance in their own right. Different root system architectures provide adaptation to different environmental stressors, but studying these belowground structures is challenging. Adaptation is also impacted by soil properties and microbial communities. For this dissertation, roots were examined in greenhouse seedling assays and field trials in Montana. Agronomic performance was also assessed for malt barley and spring wheat cultivars varying for stay-green, a biparental barley population segregating for stay-green, and a diverse mapping population of barley lines from different breeding programs. Stay-green cultivars had a greater percentage of deep roots, more prolonged root growth during grain fill, and greater yield. Analysis of the biparental population identified genetic co-segregations of stay-green, root phenotypes, grain quality, and quality stability between environments, further supporting the benefit of stay-green in dry environments and its connection to roots. The diverse mapping population was used to find associations between the relative abundances of bacteria in the rhizosphere and barley genetic loci, that were mostly environment specific. Rhizospheric bacteria may be involved in local adaptation of plants. Finding plant genetic signal for these microbial characteristics supports the idea that it may be possible to breed crops with enhanced ability to recruit beneficial microbiomes if environmental influence and agronomic impact can be understood. Root examination remains a challenging but worthwhile avenue to pursue in crop adaptation research.