Winter chilling is critical for flowering and fruiting of many temperate fruits, with evidence that blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum L.) cropping has been adversely affected by warm winters. Accurate models of chill accumulation in blackcurrant are required so that breeding strategies can be formulated for the generation of new cultivars with resilience to future climates. Existing models for chill a...

Pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) is an important cause of quality loss in many cereal crops and is particularly prevalent and damaging in wheat. Resistance to PHS is therefore a valuable target trait in many breeding programs. The Phs-A1 locus on wheat chromosome arm 4AL has been consistently shown to account for a significant proportion of natural variation to PHS in diverse mapping populations. Ho...

In the hard winter wheat region of the Great Plains, Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a sporadic disease. Drought is more common than rain at flowering, however, within the region, rain at and after flowering often occurs in some parts of the region leading to severe FHB in localized areas. Hence the need to identify lines with FHB tolerance is needed, but most plant breeding programs have insuffi...

Seventy-two sorghum accessions were randomly selected from the Ethiopia, Mali, Sudan, and Uganda germplasm collections maintained by the US National Plant Germplasm System to evaluate variation in anthracnose resistance. The accessions were planted in a randomized complete block design in College Station, Texas during the 2007 and 2008 growing seasons. Twenty-six accessions exhibited a resistan...

Understanding the distribution of genetic variations and accession structures is an important factor for managing genetic resources, but also for using proper germplasm in association map analyses and breeding programs. The globe artichoke is the fourth most important horticultural crop in Europe. Here, we report the results of a molecular analysis of a collection including globe artichoke and ...

Because of their adaptation to a diverse set of habitats and stresses, wild species of cultivated crops offer new sources of genetic diversity for germplasm improvement. Using an Infinium array representing a genome-wide set of 8303 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), phylogenetic relationships and allelic diversity were evaluated within a diversity panel of germplasm from Solanum sect. Pet...

With the rapid rate of adoption by farmers worldwide of crop varieties containing multiple value-added traits, mainly genetically modified traits, as many as 15 to 20 transgenic events may be offered in new maize hybrids by 2030 (Que et al. 2010; Fraley 2012). Multiple Trait Integration (MTI) is designed to integrate the specific transgenic events conferring the value-added trait phenotypes int...

A color classification program was developed for classifying the corn germplasm into seven different color groups based on kernel colors. This heuristic based rule supervised color classification program has an overall accuracy of 99%. Disciplines Agriculture | Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Comments This paper was published in Proc. SPIE 1836, Optics in Agriculture and Forestry, 78 (...

Vitreousness and Stenvert kernel hardness characteristics in corn germplasm have been related to in situ and in vivo starch digestibility in lactating dairy cows. Because of the tedious nature of determining vitreousness by manual dissection or conducting Stenvert hardness measurements, it is challenging to screen corn germplasm for animal performance potential. The resistance of corn to grindi...