The Oregon Promise Barley Population: A Tool for Understanding the Genetic Basis of Traits Fundamental for Barley Production, Malting, Brewing, and Distilling

The simultaneous availability of unique germplasm resources and cost-effective high-throughput genotyping allows for accelerated genome exploration and gene discovery.  Our germplasm – the Oregon Promise population – is an array of 200 barley doubled haploids developed from the cross of Full Pint  x Golden Promise.  The spring 2-row parents have contrasting alleles at two of the dwarfing genes deployed in current varieties.  The four homozygous combinations of these plant height alleles lead to contrasting phenotypes and each allele has pleiotropic effects on a range of other traits. Golden Promise is an iconic variety for malting, brewing, and distilling; Full Pint is a contributor to the craft brew Renaissance. Accordingly, the Oregon Promise will provide a valuable resource for extending current knowledge of malting and brewing genes to the frontiers of sensory assessment. The population shows transgressive segregation for adult plant resistance to stripe rust.  As this disease is likely to become increasingly prevalent as a consequence of climate change, expanding the catalog of genes conferring durable resistance to this pathogen is an essential defensive breeding step.  The availability of a quick-turnaround and cost effective SNP genotyping service (400+ markers) at Eureka Genomics (developed in collaboration with the James Hutton Institute) allows accelerated linkage map construction, QTL detection, and unraveling of gene interactions and pleiotropic effects  based on the multi-environment, multi-trait  phenotyping of the Oregon Promise  population.  This project is possible thanks to the tools and knowledge generated by the USDA-NIFA T-CAP project.