Barley yield formation under abiotic stress depends on the interplay between flowering time genes and environmental cues
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Date
2019
Authors
Wiegmann, M.
Maurer, A.
Pham, A.
March, T.J.
Al-Abdallat, A.
Thomas, W.T.B.
Bull, H.J.
Shahid, M.
Eglinton, J.
Baum, M.
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Journal article
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Scientific Reports, 2019; 9(1):6397-1-6397-16
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Mathias Wiegmann, Andreas Maurer, Anh Pham, Timothy J. March, Ayed Al-Abdallat, William T. B. Thomas, Hazel J. Bull, Mohammed Shahid, Jason Eglinton, Michael Baum, Andrew J. Flavell, Mark Tester, Klaus Pillen
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Abstract
Since the dawn of agriculture, crop yield has always been impaired through abiotic stresses. In a field trial across five locations worldwide, we tested three abiotic stresses, nitrogen deficiency, drought and salinity, using HEB-YIELD, a selected subset of the wild barley nested association mapping population HEB-25. We show that barley flowering time genes Ppd-H1, Sdw1, Vrn-H1 and Vrn-H3 exert pleiotropic effects on plant development and grain yield. Under field conditions, these effects are strongly influenced by environmental cues like day length and temperature. For example, in Al-Karak, Jordan, the day length-sensitive wild barley allele of Ppd-H1 was associated with an increase of grain yield by up to 30% compared to the insensitive elite barley allele. The observed yield increase is accompanied by pleiotropic effects of Ppd-H1 resulting in shorter life cycle, extended grain filling period and increased grain size. Our study indicates that the adequate timing of plant development is crucial to maximize yield formation under harsh environmental conditions. We provide evidence that wild barley alleles, introgressed into elite barley cultivars, can be utilized to support grain yield formation. The presented knowledge may be transferred to related crop species like wheat and rice securing the rising global food demand for cereals.
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Published online: 25 April 2019
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© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.