Exploring barley diversity for resilience and sustainability

Challenges

There is a pressing need to establish an environmentally benign and sustainable supply of locally produced high-quality barley grain to safeguard the economically important premium food and drink (and feed) sectors. The sector is represented by the malting, brewing and distilling industries comprising 2,274 breweries (in 2018), 122 Scotch Whisky and 441 Gin distilleries (The Drinks Business, 2020). The national importance of the distillery sector is reflected in its estimated gross value added of £8.25 billion. The Scotch Whisky industry provides £5.5 billion with the majority exports that comprise 20% of all UK food and drink exports value. Barley destined for the feed market represents around two-thirds of the annual crop. The sector would benefit from more resilient and sustainable production.

The process of malting and distilling is energy intensive. The industry has already made enormous strides in reducing carbon outputs and has ambitious plans to bring the production of whisky towards net zero. However, only half of the carbon used to produce a bottle of whisky is derived from manufacturing. The remainder largely comes from the production of grain and malt – processes beyond the industries’ direct control.

In the UK, barley cultivars are generally bred from the narrow ‘cultivated’ gene pool and selected through a registration process operating under intensive agricultural systems. Such systems create potential vulnerabilities to pests and diseases, environmental sensitivity, and high input requirements. The use of crop diversity, adapted to low or no inputs, has long been discussed as an approach to tackle these vulnerabilities. However, greater crop diversity has been generally unattractive for use in plant breeding due to performance issues of early-generation genotypes and associated economic risks (for example, it is too tall or not adapted to northwest European conditions). Natural diversity is in fact a rich source of genes and alleles that, together or on their own, have great potential for improving resilience of the crop. More work is needed to actively exploit this variation to understand trait evolution at the genetic level towards ultimately developing more environmentally benign crop production.

Questions

Solutions

The overarching aim of this project is to explore the practical use of extensive natural variation present in the primary barley gene pool to improve the environmental sustainability of crop production.

Mobilising untapped genetic diversity

We are improving and exploiting genetic variation in diverse barley landraces and wild relatives from the primary gene pool and exploring genetic approaches in which recombination is genetically altered to enable access to the secondary gene pool. We are using traditional approaches to create new and novel germplasm resources, which are being combined with deep genotypic and phenotypic analysis to characterise the resulting germplasm. We address a fundamental issue that is vexing the genetic resources and breeding communities: how to efficiently extract value from diverse germplasm in crop improvement programs for complex and multigenic traits.

Safeguarding production

We are addressing pressing environmental issues affecting barley crop production through searches for genetic solutions. We embrace innovative -omics scale research to explore both climate and regulatory issues with a view to developing genetic or agronomic strategies to minimise losses and maintain production. We are supporting research to explore and improve weed management and chemical inputs that could involve the development of new or novel crop types. 

Plant-soil interactions

We are exploring plant-soil interactions addressing soil nitrogen, macro- and micro-nutrients (including manganese) uptake efficiency. This includes the identification of germplasm and collection of data that reveal genetic variation for the studied traits, and subsequently the identification of genetic loci controlling that variation. We are delivering the molecular identity and validation of genes/alleles that condition the studied traits and appropriate germplasm for use in plant breeding. In the case of manganese uptake efficiency, previously developed germplasm developed is already well advanced and we expect practical impacts of this work to be on broad acre mainland barley crop production as well as improved production in marginal crofting communities. Our focus is on the interaction between the barley crop and its below ground growing environment and the efficient use of resident or applied inputs in crop production.

Data Management and Open Science

We are opening the analysis of complex transcriptomic datasets to the general research community through intuitive and user-friendly interfaces. We are also extending the globally established GERMINATE plant genetic resources database infrastructure to incorporate data-dense, multi-omics and time-series information, including automatically captured field phenotypic data. Key milestones include the release of data management pipelines for short and long read RNA-sequence transcriptome data and periodic updates to different software that incorporate either additional functionality or improve user experience. We are developing web-accessible research tools or infrastructure that promote data curation and analysis.

Project Partners

Progress