Abstract
Low temperatures during the flowering period of cereals can lead to floret sterility, yield reduction, and economic losses in Australian crops. In order to breed for improved frost susceptibility, selection methods are urgently required to identify novel sources of frost tolerant germplasm. However, the presence of genotype by environment interactions (i.e. variety responses to a change in environment) is a major constraint to select the most appropriate varieties in any given target environment. An advanced method of analysis for multi-environment trials that includes factor analytic selection tools to summarize overall performance and stability to a specific trait across the environments could deliver useful information to guide growers and plant breeding programs in providing the most appropriate decision making-strategy. In this study, the updated selection tools approached in this multi-environment trials (MET) analysis have allowed variety comparisons with similar frost susceptibility but which have a different response to changes in the environment or vice versa. This MET analysis included a wide range of sowing dates grown at multiple locations from 2010 to 2019, respectively. These results, as far as we are aware, show for the first-time genotypic differences to frost damage through a MET analysis by phenotyping a vast number of accurate empirical measurements that reached in excess of 557,000 spikes. This has resulted in a substantial number of experimental units (10,317 and 5,563 in wheat and barley, respectively) across a wide range of sowing times grown at multiple locations from 2010 to 2019. Varieties with low frost overall performance (OP) and low frost stability (root mean square deviation -RMSD) were less frost susceptible, with performance more consistent across all environments, while varieties with low OP and high RMSD were adapted to specific environmental conditions.
Highlights
In barley, variation in reproductive frost tolerance was reported to be associated with a locus on chromosome 2H (Reinheimer et al, 2004).screening germplasm in the field using natural frost has been extremely challenging and often fails
This allocation of treatments to plots resulted in a nested design that is similar to a split-plot design (Bailey, 2008), except that the time of sowing (TOS) was completely aliased with whole blocks and in the following whenever TOS is referred to, it is bracketed with whole blocks
We have shown for the first-time genotypic differences to frost damage in barley and extended the wheat data-set by years from what was reported in Cocks et al (2019)
Summary
Variation in reproductive frost tolerance was reported to be associated with a locus on chromosome 2H (Reinheimer et al, 2004).screening germplasm in the field using natural frost has been extremely challenging and often fails. Queensland; (iii) manipulating plants to manage natural frost in portable containers (Tshewang et al, 2017); (iv) adopting serial sowing with photoperiod extension; (v) or through the artificial photoperiod gradient method (Frederiks et al, 2012). This latter method can link together the genotypes (at the same trial) with a different maturity type, to enable a similar growth stage to be determined during a natural frost event. Such technology comes at a greater economic cost, due to the implementation of appropriate infrastructure and equipment, and the ability to analyze and validate different hypotheses
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