RESPONSE OF WHEAT COMPOSITE CROSS POPULATIONS TO DISEASE AND CLIMATE VARIATION OVER 13 GENERATIONS

Highlights

• Agronomic performance of wheat populations comparable to modern cultivars.

• Performance of populations depends on parental cultivar selection.

• Agronomic advantage of populations under particular environmental stresses.

• Heterogeneous populations better suited to low-input conditions.

Abstract

Since the F₅ (2005), three winter wheat composite cross populations (CCPs) based on germplasm specifically suitable for low-input conditions were subjected to natural selection under organic and conventional management. In the F₆, each CCP was divided into two parallel populations (12 CCPs in total) and maintained continuously until 2018. Commonly used modern cultivars with different disease susceptibilities were grown alongside to assess the agronomic performance of the CCPs. The organically managed CCPs were comparable in yield and foliar disease resistance to two continuously used reference cultivars, Achat and Capo. In contrast, under conventional management the cv. Capo outyielded the CCPs (Achat was not tested), highlighting the importance of parental cultivar choice for specific management systems. The CCPs were found to be moderately resistant to brown rust and even to the newly emerged stripe rust races prevalent in Europe since 2011. Differences between the CCPs were mainly due to parental genetic background and were significant in the first five generations, but were no longer so in the last five generations. In addition, these differences tended to vary depending on the experimental year and the environmental stresses present. In conclusion, the CCPs despite being derived from older cultivars are able to compete with more recently released reference cultivars under organic farming practices and represent a dynamic germplasm resource.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

evolutionary breeding / heterogeneous crop population / management system

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2021394 contains supplementary materials (Tables S1–S3).

Acknowledgements

We thank Drs Andreas Butz and Sarah Brumlop and numerous students and technicians for their work on the heterogeneous wheat populations in Neu-Eichenberg. This work was financed partly through the “Zentrale Forschungsförderung” University of Kassel, “Bundesprogramm Ökologischer Landbau und andere Formen nachhaltiger Landwirtschaft” Project No. 2812OE021 in the framework of CORE Organic II and through the INSUSFAR (INnovative approaches to optimize genetic diversity for SUStainable FARming systems of the future) Project (FKZ 031A350C), financed by the “Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung” in the framework of the IPAS (Innovative Pflanzenzüchtung im Anbausystem) Initiative and the EU-project ReMIX (Horizon 2020 Project No. 727217).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Odette Denise Weedon and Maria Renate Finckh declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)