Katherine Frels

University of Minnesota Twin Cities | UMN · Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics

Wheat (Triticum spp and, particularly, T. aestivum L.) is an essential cereal with increased human and animal nutritional demand. Therefore , there is a need to enhance wheat yield and genetic gain using modern breeding technologies alongside proven methods to achieve the necessary increases in productivity. These modern technologies will allow bre...

Reliance on summer annual crops in the Upper Midwest results in fallow land from late fall through early spring, providing opportunities to integrate winter crops, such as pennycress (Thlapsi arvense L.), onto the landscape. Pennycress agronomics have primarily been studied using unimproved wild‐type lines prone to seed shatter, resulting in signif...

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) thrives in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world; nevertheless, it suffers large grain yield losses due to drought stress. A panel of 426 lines of barley was evaluated in Egypt under deficit (DI) and full irrigation (FI) during the 2019 and 2020 growing seasons. Observations were recorded on the number of days to f...

Wheat streak mosaic virus (WSMV) is a mite‐vectored virus with substantial economic impact on wheat production. One of the effective sources of resistance to WSMV, Wsm1, is carried on a translocation from Thinopyrum intermedium. The original whole arm form of this translocation (T4DL·4JsS) was highly effective against WSMV but carried a substantial...

The University of Nebraska has bred some of the most winter hardy wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivars in the United States. With the advent of a new race of stem rust in Africa, the breeding program identified a testing site in northern Egypt, a Mediterranean environment, for seedling disease resistance screening. Quite surprisingly, the Nebrask...

Camelina is being developed as a winter oilseed cover crop. Early flowering and maturity are desired traits in camelina to allow for relay planting or seeding of a summer annual following camelina harvest. Here we report that while all winter biotype accessions of camelina have a functional allele of FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) on chromosome 20, there...

Field pennycress (Thlaspi arvense L.) is a new winter annual cash cover crop with high oil content and seed yield, excellent winter hardiness, early maturation, and resistance to most pests and diseases. It provides living cover on fallow croplands between summer seasons, and in doing so reduces nutrient leaching into water sources, mitigates soil...

Midwest crop production is dominated by two summer annual crops grown in rotation, viz., corn (Zea mays L.) and soybean (Glycine max L.). Winter oilseed crops, such as pennycress (Thlaspi arvense L.), can provide ecosystem and economic benefits when added to the corn–soybean rotation. However, adding a new crop adds risks, such as increased pest pr...

Thlaspi arvense (field pennycress) is being domesticated as a winter annual oilseed crop capable of improving ecosystems and intensifying agricultural productivity without increasing land use. It is a selfing diploid with a short life cycle and is amenable to genetic manipulations, making it an accessible field-based model species for genetics and...

Thlaspi arvense (field pennycress) is being domesticated as a winter annual oilseed crop capable of improving ecosystems and intensifying agricultural productivity without increasing land use. It is a selfing diploid with a short life cycle and is amenable to genetic manipulations, making it an accessible field-based model species for genetics and...

The oilseed species Thlaspi arvense (pennycress)—a weed that was only recently removed from the wild—has the potential to provide new sources of food and bioproducts when grown as a winter cover crop. Domestication of wild species has historically taken hundreds to thousands of years, but by making use of large-scale high-throughput comparative gen...

Agriculture in the Upper Midwest of the USA is characterized by a short growing season and unsustainable farming practices including low-diversity cropping systems and high fertilizer inputs. One method to reduce the magnitude of these problems is by integrating a winter annual into the summer-annual-dominant cropping system. For this reason, penny...

Evaluation of genetic diversity within wild populations is an essential process for improvement and domestication of new crop species. This process involves evaluation of population structure and individual accessions based on genetic markers, growth habits, and geographic collection area. In this study, accessions of field pennycress were analyzed...

The oilseed species Thlaspi arvense (pennycress) is being domesticated as a new crop that can provide both important ecosystem services and intensify farmland output. Through the use of high throughput sequencing and phenotyping, along with classical mutagenesis key traits needed for pennycress domestication have been identified. Domestication trai...

Thlaspi arvense (pennycress) has potential to be domesticated into a new oilseed crop. Information from an extensive body of research on the related plant species, Arabidopsis, can be used to greatly speed this process. Genome‐scale comparisons in this report documented that pennycress and Arabidopsis share similar gene duplication. This finding le...

Pennycress is being domesticated as a new winter oilseed crop to be grown between corn harvest and soybean planting the following year in the Upper Midwestern United States. The aim of this research was to evaluate seed composition traits in a large pennycress mutant population using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). We tested the hypothesis that...

Wheat nitrogen use efficiency must be improved to reduce the need for nitrogen (N) fertilizers. This study was conducted to determine if measurement of canopy spectral reflectance (CSR) could be used to non-destructively and indirectly select wheat genotypes with improved N use traits. Canopy spectral reflectance measurements were collected during...

The utilization of DNA molecular markers in plant breeding to maximize selection response via marker-assisted selection (MAS) and genomic selection (GS) has revolutionized plant breeding. A key factor affecting GS applicability is the choice of molecular marker platform. Genotyping-by-sequencing scored SNPs (GBS-scored SNPs) provides a large number...

Phenotypic plasticity describes the range of phenotypes produced by a single genotype in different environments. We quantified the extent of phenotypic plasticity (evaluated as respon­siveness to varying environmental conditions) of thermal time to heading and grain yield in 299 hard winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes from the US Great P...

W heat is a primary staple cereal for human consumption, with 2011–2012 world production of nearly 700 Tg. Global per capita food consumption of wheat (67.7 kg, FAO, 2012) is the highest of any grain crop. Approximately 68% of the world wheat crop is used directly for food, and 21% is fed to livestock (FAO, 2012). People who rely on cereals as a st...

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) grain mineral concentrations tend to decrease as yields increase, therefore, breeding for yield improvement may reduce wheat nutritional quality. The objectives of this study were to survey grain mineral concentration in Great Plains hard winter wheat to assess (i) the heritable variation for grain mineral concentration...

The utilization of DNA molecular markers in plant breeding to maximize selection response via marker assisted selection (MAS) and genomic selection (GS) has revolutionized plant breeding. The Nebraska Winter Wheat Breeding Program is interested in developing and utilizing GS. A key factor affecting GS applicability is the choice of marker platform....

As nitrogen fertilizer costs and environmental concerns rise, the need to breed nitrogen use efficient (NUE) crops is increasing. However, traditional phenotyping methods for NUE traits are labor intensive and destructive. Numerous publications have highlighted the use of remote sensing of canopy spectral reflectance (CSR) as a proxy for physical s...

The need to breed nitrogen use efficient (NUE) crops is growing due to increasing nitrogen costs and environmental concerns. However, traditional phenotyping methods for NUE are labor intensive and destructive. Canopy spectral reflectance (CSR) can be used as a proxy for physical sampling. During the 2012 growing season, the USDA-NIFA Triticeace Co...

Cereals are dominant sources of cadmium in human diets; therefore grain cadmium concentration is regulated by the EU. Pollution-safe cultivars of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) can reduce risk to human health from cadmium consumption. Variation in cadmium concentration in durum wheat (Triticum turgidum var. durum) is well documented, but geneti...