IBH Seminar | Exploring wild barley alleles to improve stress tolerance in elite barley

Due to its high adaptation ability, barley is globally cultivated across a broad range of contrasting environments. Currently, the yield capacity of crop plants is increasingly under challenge from the rising occurrence of climate change-associated biotic and abiotic stresses. In order to unravel stress response mechanisms and to develop resilience strategies, barley as a diploid genetic model benefits from the availability of genomic and genetic tools, including high-quality pan-genome and pan-transcriptome assemblies, large SNP arrays, gene editing, genomic prediction, and speed breeding.

In order to improve the resilience of barley elite cultivars against biotic and abiotic stresses, genes of related wild species can be introgressed into cultivars. For this, the nested association mapping population Halle Exotic Barley (HEB-25) was developed in the Pillen lab from crosses of 25 wild barley species with the spring barley cultivar Barke. Since 2015, the population was characterized genetically by SNP genotyping and genome sequencing and phenotypically by measuring plant performance in multi-location field trials under varying stresses and controlled greenhouse experiments. Afterwards, the data sets were combined in genome-wide-association-studies to identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) and candidate genes, which are responsible for improving plant performance under stress. With modern genome and transcriptome data at hand, the effects of wild barley QTL and candidate genes can be characterized to explain stress resilience on a molecular level and to use this information for selection in modern omics-based plant breeding programs.


Speaker biography -
Professor Klaus Pillen studied Agricultural Sciences (1982-1988) at University of Bonn. Subsequently, he moved to Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (1989-1992) where he earned a PhD in Plant Biology. Thereafter, he received a fellowship of the Human Frontier Science Organization (HFSO) to spent 3 years (1993-1995) at Cornell University, USA, working on tomato genetics. Afterwards, he acted as a researcher and teacher in Molecular Plant Breeding at University of Bonn (1996-2006). From 2006 to 2008, Pillen headed the Independent Research Group on Barley Genetics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPI-PB), Cologne. Since 2008, he is the Full Professor of Plant Breeding at Martin-Luther-University Halle. Since 2024, he also acts as the current president of the German Plant Breeding Society.

Pillen's major research interest are molecular breeding, genomics and quantitative genetics of barley and wheat. In addition, he uses artificial intelligence (AI) to combine genomic data, spectral data and climate data in order to model and predict plant growth and plant performance utilized in plant breeding.