Mark E Sorrells

Cornell University | CU · Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics

The modeling of genotype × environment interactions (GEI) is important to understand how new crops perform in different environments and management systems. Naked barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is a type of barley where the hull threshes freely from the grain and can be used for multiple end uses, including food, malt, and animal feed. We examined the...

The dispersion of plant pathogens, such as rust spores, is responsible for more than 20% of global crop yield loss annually. However, the release mechanism of pathogens from flexible plant surfaces into the canopy is not well understood. In this study, we investigated the interplay between leaf elasticity and rainfall, revealing how a flexible leaf...

Selection for more nutritious crop plants is an important goal of plant breeding to improve food quality and contribute to human health outcomes. While there are efforts to integrate genomic prediction to accelerate breeding progress, an ongoing challenge is identifying strategies to improve accuracy when predicting within biparental populations in...

Dispersion of plant pathogens, such as rust spores, is responsible for a large portion of global crop production loss every year, in addition to the threat they pose to human health. However, the release mechanism of pathogens and other allergic particles from flexible plant surfaces into canopy turbulence has not been understood well. Focusing on...

Key message Malt for craft “all-malt” brewing can have high quality, PHS resistance, and malted in normal timeframes. Canadian style adjunct malt is associated with PHS susceptibility. Abstract Expansion of malting barley production into non-traditional growing regions and erratic weather has increased the demand for preharvest sprouting (PHS) res...

Threshability, defined here as the propensity of grains to lose their hull after harvest, is a key trait in naked barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). While threshability is a defining characteristic of naked grains and has been found to be associated with grain size and shape, its genetic architecture is poorly described. The goals of this study were to i...

Meiotic recombination is a source of allelic diversity, but the low frequency and biased distribution of crossovers that occur during meiosis limits the genetic variation available to plant breeders. Simulation studies previously identified that increased recombination frequency can retain more genetic variation and drive greater genetic gains than...

Stem rust caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis f.sp. tritici Eriks. & E. Henn. ( Pgt ) threatens the global production of both durum wheat ( Triticum t urgidum L. ssp. durum (Desf.) Husnot ) and common wheat ( Triticum aestivum L.). The objective of this study was to evaluate a durum wheat recombinant inbred line (RIL) population from a cross bet...

Amylase/trypsin inhibitors (ATIs) are widely consumed in cereal-based foods and have been implicated in adverse reactions to wheat exposure, such as respiratory and food allergy, and intestinal responses associated with coeliac disease and non-coeliac wheat sensitivity. ATIs occur in multiple isoforms which differ in the amounts present in differen...

This study aimed to understand how genetics and environment influence organic winter naked barley composition and functionality, and to identify traits that might effectively categorize basic physicochemical functionality of food barley. Across three years, two locations, and 15 genotypes, genotype significantly influenced all 10 food-related trait...

Prediction of trait values in plant breeding populations typically relies on assumptions about marker effect homogeneity across populations. Evidence is presented for winter malting barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) germination traits that a single, causative, large‐effect gene in the Seed dormancy 1 region on Chromosome 5H, HvAlaAT1 (Qsd1), leads to het...

Expansion of malting barley production into non-traditional growing regions and erratic weather has increased the demand for preharvest sprouting (PHS) resistant, high quality malting barley cultivars. This is hindered by the relatively unknown relationships between PHS resistance and malting quality. Here we present a three-year study of malting q...

In order to produce successful varieties, wheat breeding programs must develop several strategies that fall under one of the following topics: line development, population improvement, and selection methods. Part I of this chapter focuses on breeding activities related to line development, while Part II discusses population improvement and selectio...

In order to produce successful varieties, wheat breeding programs must develop several strategies that fall under one of the following topics: line development, population improvement, and selection methods. This chapter focuses on breeding activities related to population improvement and selection methods, while Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-90673-3_5 d...

There is an increased demand for food-grade grains grown sustainably. Hard red winter wheat has comparative advantages for organic farm rotations due to fall soil cover, weed competition, and grain yields. However, limitations of currently available cultivars such as poor disease resistance, winter hardiness, and baking quality, challenges its adop...

Plant metabolites are important traits for plant breeders seeking to improve nutrition and agronomic performance yet integrating selection for metabolomic traits can be limited by phenotyping expense and degree of genetic characterization, especially of uncommon metabolites. As such, developing generalizable genomic selection methods based on bioch...

Allopolyploidy greatly expands the range of possible regulatory interactions among functionally redundant homoeologous genes. However, connection between the emerging regulatory complexity and expression and phenotypic diversity in polyploid crops remains elusive. Here, we use diverse wheat accessions to map expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL...

We investigated increasing genetic gain for grain yield using early generation genomic selection (GS). A training set of 1,334 elite wheat breeding lines tested over three field seasons was used to generate Genomic Estimated Breeding Values (GEBVs) for grain yield under irrigated conditions applying markers and three different prediction methods: (...

Key message HvMKK3 alleles are temperature sensitive and are major contributors to environmental stability of preharvest sprouting in barley. Abstract Preharvest sprouting (PHS) can severely damage barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) malting quality, but PHS resistance is often negatively correlated with malting quality. Seed dormancy is closely related t...

Naked barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) grain threshes freely from its hull during harvesting and cleaning. Much of the available naked barley germplasm is unadapted to U.S. barley growing regions, and few genotypes have been selected to thrive under organic systems. The goal of this research was to characterize a set of spring naked barley genotypes for...

Background Pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) is a major problem for wheat production due to its direct detrimental effects on wheat yield, end-use quality and seed viability. Annually, PHS is estimated to cause > 1.0 billion USD in losses worldwide. Therefore, identifying PHS resistance quantitative trait loci (QTLs) is crucial to aid molecular breeding...

Climate changes leading to higher summer temperatures can adversely affect cool season crops like spring barley. In the Upper Midwest region of the United States, one option for escaping this stress factor is to plant winter or facultative type cultivars in the autumn and then harvest in early summer before the onset of high-temperature stress. How...

Background Pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) is a major problem for wheat production due to its direct detrimental effects on wheat yield, end-use quality and seed viability. Annually, PHS is estimated to cause > 1.0 billion USD in losses worldwide. Therefore, identifying PHS resistance quantitative trait loci (QTLs) is crucial to aid molecular breeding...

Plant breeding strategies to optimize metabolite profiles are necessary to develop health-promoting food crops. In oats (Avena sativa L.), seed metabolites are of interest for their antioxidant properties, yet have not been a direct target of selection in breeding. In a diverse oat germplasm panel spanning a century of breeding, we investigated the...

Key message Integration of multi-omics data improved prediction accuracies of oat agronomic and seed nutritional traits in multi-environment trials and distantly related populations in addition to the single-environment prediction. Abstract Multi-omics prediction has been shown to be superior to genomic prediction with genome-wide DNA-based geneti...

Plant metabolites are important for plant breeders to improve nutrition and agronomic performance, yet integrating selection for metabolomic traits is limited by phenotyping expense and limited genetic characterization, especially of uncommon metabolites. As such, developing biologically-based and generalizable genomic selection methods for metabol...

To improve the efficiency of high-density genotype data storage and imputation in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), we applied the Practical Haplotype Graph (PHG) tool. The wheat PHG database was built using whole-exome capture sequencing data from a diverse set of 65 wheat accessions. Population haplotypes were inferred for the reference genome...

Competition from weeds often reduces wheat yields, especially in organic management systems or when herbicide-resistant weeds are present. Breeding wheat for increased competitive ability is an important aspect of integrated weed control. Selecting directly for weed-competitive ability (WCA), however, is challenged by difficult field measurements,...

Although the effect of local adaptation is well documented in evolutionary biology, few studies have quantified the impact of local adaptation in plant breeding. Decentralized plant breeding programs have the potential to harness local adaptation for crop improvement, but the effectiveness of such models is understudied. We quantified the ability o...

Key message GWAS identified eight yield-related, peak starch type of waxy and wild-type starch and 21 starch pasting property-related traits (QTLs). Prediction ability of eight GS models resulted in low to high predictability, depending on trait, heritability, and genetic architecture. AbstractCassava is both a food and an industrial crop in Africa...

It is important to understand the genetic gain achieved through selection of key yield traits for planning future breeding strategies in developing high yielding wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivars. The aim of this study was to characterize the genetic changes and genotype × environment (G×E) interaction by additive main effect and multiplicativ...

Most oat grains destined for human consumption must possess the ability to pass through an industrial de-hulling process with minimal breakage and waste. Uniform grain size and a high groat to hull ratio are desirable traits related to milling performance. The purpose of this study was to characterize the genetic architecture of traits related to m...

Rye has been playing an important agronomic, nutritional and social role throughout human civilization. In the last 50 years, rye grain yields have increased but not enough to offset the decrease in cropping area to maintain production. In this context, hybrid rye has great potential due to high yield performance and greater resilience to climate v...

New breeding programs are faced with many challenges including evaluation of unknown germplasm, initiation of breeding populations that will satisfy short‐ and long‐term breeding goals, and implementation of efficient phenotyping strategies for multiple traits. Genomic selection (GS) is a potentially valuable tool for recently established breeding...

Preharvest sprouting (PHS) can severely damage barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) malting quality and is of particular concern in locations with a high frequency of precipitation around harvest. Malting quality and PHS resistance are often negatively correlated, and the SD2 locus on chromosome 5H has been associated with both traits. Using three spring ba...

Preharvest sprouting (PHS) resistance is essential in malting barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) production to prevent damage caused by late season moisture but may be negatively correlated with malting quality traits. The germination percentage and germination rate (GI) in malting barley are measures of both PHS resistance and suitability for malting. Fu...

Lightning’ (Reg. no. CV‐374, PI 698654), experimental designation DH130910, is a two‐row facultative barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) released by Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station in 2020. It was bred for fall planting and is well adapted to the U.S. Pacific Northwest and New York State. Because it does not require vernalization for a timely vegeta...

Plant breeding strategies to optimize metabolite profiles are necessary to develop health promoting food crops. In oats (Avena sativa L.), seed metabolites are of interest for their antioxidant properties and their agronomic role in mitigating disease severity, yet have not been a direct target of selection in breeding. In a diverse oat germplasm p...

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a devastating disease of wheat and barley. In the US, a significant long-term investment in breeding FHB resistant cultivars began after the 1990s. However, to this date, no study has been performed to understand and monitor the rate of genetic progress in FHB resistance as a result of this investment. Using 20 years o...

Positional‐based cloning is a foundational method for understanding the genes and gene networks that control valuable agronomic traits such as grain yield components. In this study, we sought to positionally clone the causal genetic variant of a 1000‐grain weight (TGW) quantitative trait loci (QTL) on wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) chromosome arm 5AL...

Continuous increase in global population prompts increased wheat production. Future wheat breeding will heavily rely on dissecting molecular and genetic bases of wheat yield and related traits which is possible through the discovery of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in constructed populations, such as recombinant inbred lines (RILs). Here, we prese...

Many of the major stem rust resistance genes deployed in commercial wheat (Triticum spp.) cultivars and breeding lines become ineffective over time because of the continuous emergence of virulent races. A genome‐wide association study (GWAS) was conducted using 26,439 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers and 280 durum wheat [Triticum turgid...

To improve the efficiency of high-density genotype data storage and imputation in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), we applied the Practical Haplotype Graph (PHG) tool. The wheat PHG database was built using whole-exome capture sequencing data from a diverse set of 65 wheat accessions. Population haplotypes were inferred for the reference genome...

Key message Integration of multi-omics data improved prediction accuracies of oat agronomic and seed nutritional traits in multi-environment trials and distantly-related populations in addition to the single-environment prediction. Multi-omics prediction has been shown to be superior to genomic prediction with genome-wide DNA-based genetic markers...

Amylase/trypsin-inhibitors (ATIs) comprise about 2–4% of the total wheat grain proteins and may contribute to natural defense against pests and pathogens. However, they are currently among the most widely studied wheat components because of their proposed role in adverse reactions to wheat consumption in humans. ATIs have long been known to contrib...

Multi-omics prediction has been shown to be superior to genomic prediction with genome-wide DNA-based genetic markers (G) for predicting phenotypes. However, most of the existing studies were based on historical datasets from one environment; therefore, they were unable to evaluate the efficiency of multi-omics prediction in multi-environment trial...

Over the past decade, genomics-assisted breeding (GAB) has been instrumental in harnessing the potential of modern genome resources and characterizing and exploiting allelic variation for germplasm enhancement and cultivar development. Sustaining GAB in the future (GAB 2.0) will rely upon a suite of new approaches that fast-track targeted manipulat...

The observable phenotype is the manifestation of information that is passed along different organization levels (transcriptional, translational, and metabolic) of a biological system. The widespread use of various omic technologies (RNA-sequencing, metabolomics, etc.) has provided plant genetics and breeders with a wealth of information on pertinen...

Oat (Avena sativa L.) seed is a rich resource of beneficial lipids, soluble fiber, protein, and antioxidants, and is considered a healthful food for humans. Little is known regarding the genetic controllers of variation for these compounds in oat seed. We characterized natural variation in the mature seed metabolome using untargeted metabolomics on...

Fusarium head blight (FHB) of Triticum spp. is caused by diverse, mycotoxigenic members of the genus Fusarium. In New York, United States, Fusarium graminearum is considered the primary FHB incitant on common wheat (Triticum aestivum), but there is no record of the Fusarium spp. colonizing wheat crops marketed as high value ‘ancient grains’ (T. dic...

Stem rust of wheat caused by Puccinia graminis Pers. f.sp. trtici Eriks and E. Henn., is the most damaging fungal disease of both common (Triticum aestivum L.) and durum (Triticum turgidum L., ssp. Durum) wheat. Continuously emerging races virulent to many of the commercially deployed qualitative resistance genes have caused remarkable loss worldwi...

Classical plant breeding has been instrumental in changing the genetic makeup of crop plants for better ecological adaptation and improved quality. This paper provides insights of the genomic changes effected in hard winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) through decades of breeding and selection in the Great Plains of the United States. Population st...

Genomic selection (GS) can improve genetic gain of complex traits in plant breeding. Phenotyping agronomic traits of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) for dual‐purpose use is expensive and time‐consuming. In this study, we compared the prediction accuracies of four GS models (RR‐BLUP, GBLUP, GAUSS, and BL) for forage yield (FY), plant height (PH)...

Demand is increasing for locally grown malt barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) in northeastern North America driven primarily by growth in the craft beer sector. A multi-site experiment was conducted to evaluate how variety (V), seeding rate (S) and nitrogen fertilizer (N) affect malt quality in the northeast. Two barley varieties (Cerveza and Newdale), t...

Breeding programs for wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and other crops require one or more generations of seed increase before replicated trials can be sown to assess yield. Extensive phenotyping at this stage is challenging because of the small sizes of plots and large numbers of lines under evaluation, and therefore, breeders typically rely on visual...

Oat (Avena sativa L.) seed is a rich resource of beneficial lipids, soluble fiber, protein, and antioxidants, and is considered a healthful food for humans. Despite these characteristics, little is known regarding the genetic controllers of variation for these compounds in oat seed. We sought to characterize natural variation in the mature seed met...

Breeding programs for wheat and many other crops require one or more generations of seed increase before replicated yield trials can be sown. Extensive phenotyping at this stage of the breeding cycle is challenging due to the small plot size and large number of lines under evaluation. Therefore, breeders typically rely on visual selection of small,...

Genomic prediction accuracy is affected by population size, trait heritability, relatedness of training and validation populations, marker density, and genetic architecture. Nested association mapping (NAM) populations have advantages in many of these features compared with biparental families and may be an effective strategy for increasing predict...

Teff (Eragrostis tef) is a cornerstone of food security in the Horn of Africa, where it is prized for stress resilience, grain nutrition, and market value. Here, we report a chromosome-scale assembly of allotetraploid teff (variety Dabbi) and patterns of subgenome dynamics. The teff genome contains two complete sets of homoeologous chromosomes, wit...

Fructans are carbohydrates found in many plants, including wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), and they serve physiological roles in both plants and humans. Genomic selection (GS) could facilitate the rapid development of climate‐resilient, nutritionally improved wheat cultivars, such as high‐fructan cultivars, while decreasing resource‐intensive phenoty...

Crown rust is the principal disease of spring oat in New York. Management with resistance genes is effective but contingent on understanding varietal responses to local pathogen populations. Field studies were conducted from 2015 to 2018 to assess the crown rust susceptibility of commercial cultivars and public breeding lines under natural conditio...

Crossovers (COs), that drive genetic exchange between homologous chromosomes, are strongly biased toward subtelomeric regions in plant species. Manipulating the rate and positions of COs to increase the genetic variation accessible to breeders is a longstanding goal. Use of genome editing reagents that induce double-stranded breaks (DSBs) or modify...

Oat ranks sixth in world cereal production and has a higher content of health‐promoting compounds compared to other cereals. However, there is neither a robust oat reference genome nor transcriptome. Using deeply sequenced full‐length mRNA libraries of oat cultivar Ogle‐C, a de novo high‐quality and comprehensive oat seed transcriptome was assemble...

Phenotyping forage quality traits is time‐consuming in forage wheat breeding. In this study, prediction accuracies of three genomic selection (GS) models (ridge regression best linear unbiased prediction [RRBLUP], Gaussian kernel [GAUSS], and Bayesian LASSO [BL, where LASSO stands for least absolute shrinkage and selection operator]) for forage qua...

Low prices have prompted growers to contemplate transitioning to an organic system. We evaluated red clover-maize-soybean-wheat (Cl-M-S-W), maize-soybean (M-S-M-S), and soybean-wheat/red clover-maize-soybean (S-W/Cl-M-S) rotations in organic and conventional systems in New York, USA from 2015 to 2018 to identify profitable organic practices. Organi...

Oat ranks sixth in world cereal production and has a higher content of health-promoting compounds compared to other cereals. However, there is neither a robust oat reference genome nor transcriptome. Using deeply sequenced full-length mRNA libraries of oat cultivar Ogle-C, a de novo high-quality and comprehensive oat seed transcriptome was assemble...

Organic wheat production has increased significantly because of increased demand by consumers. We used the same variety to evaluate organic (seed treatment) and conventional wheat (no seed treatment) under no-till conditions in 2016 and 2018 with recommended (296 kernels/m2 and 80 kg N/ha) and high inputs (420 kernels/m2 and 56 + 56 kg N/ha) to ide...

Oat (Avena sativa L.) has a high concentration of oils, comprised primarily of healthful unsaturated oleic and linoleic fatty acids. To accelerate oat plant breeding efforts, we sought to identify loci associated with variation in fatty acid composition, defined as the types and quantities of fatty acids. We genotyped a panel of 500 oat cultivars w...

Genomic selection (GS) models have been validated for many quantitative traits in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) breeding. However, those models are mostly constrained within the same growing cycle and the extension of GS to the case of across cycles has been a challenge, mainly due to the low predictive accuracy resulting from two factors: reduced g...

Kahiluoto et al. (1) assert that climate resilience in Eu-ropean wheat has declined due to current breedingpractices. To support this alarming claim, the authorsreport yield variance data indicating increasingly ho-mogeneous responses to climatic fluctuations inmodern wheat cultivars. They evaluated“responsediversity,”a measure of responses to envi...

A molecular linkage map of cultivated oat composed of 561 loci has been developed using 7 1 recombinant inbred lines from a cross between Avena byzantina cv. Kanota and A. sativa cv. Ogle. The loci are mainly restriction fragment length polymorphisms detected by oat cDNA clones from leaf, endosperm, and root tissue, as well as by barley leaf cDNA c...

A molecular linkage map of cultivated oat composed of 561 loci has been developed using 7 1 recombinant inbred lines from a cross between Avena byzantina cv. Kanota and A. sativa cv. Ogle. The loci are mainly restriction fragment length polymorphisms detected by oat cDNA clones from leaf, endosperm, and root tissue, as well as by barley leaf cDNA c...

diploid and hexaploid oat maps

Oat ( Avena sativa L.) has a high concentration of oils, comprised primarily of healthful unsaturated oleic and linoleic fatty acids. To accelerate oat plant breeding efforts, we sought to identify loci associated with variation in fatty acid composition, defined as the types and quantities of fatty acids. We genotyped a panel of 500 oat cultivars...

Market changes in the malting and brewing industries have increased the demand for locally produced barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) in many regions across North America. Breeding for productive barley cultivars in diverse growing environments is complicated by genotype × environment interactions (GEIs), which can make selection for broad adaptation dif...

Hyperspectral reflectance phenotyping and genomic selection are two emerging technologies that have the potential to increase plant breeding efficiency by improving prediction accuracy for grain yield. Hyperspectral cameras quantify canopy reflectance across a wide range of wavelengths that are associated with numerous biophysical and biochemical p...

Hybridization between related species results in the formation of an allopolyploid with multiple subgenomes. These subgenomes will each contain complete, yet evolutionarily divergent, sets of genes. Like a diploid hybrid, allopolyploids will have two versions, or homeoalleles, for every gene. Partial functional redundancy between homeologous genes...