Abstract: The genebank of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) holds the 2^nd largest collection of Barley (Hordeum) species, storing over thirty-two thousand accessions. Thus, the great opportunity and challenge for pre-breeding lies in the effective identification of useful material and the rapid introgression of novel alleles. While the use of landraces (the Good) is relatively easy, wild Barley (H. vulgare spontaneum; The Bad) bears many more challenges, and introgressions from the secondary genepool (H. Bulbosum L; The Ugly) are bordering the impossible.

For landraces, a suite of tools that allow for trait-targeted pre-breeding have been developed. The use of FIGS allows for the creation of sub-sets with an increased probability of harbouring useful genes for any trait (Mackay and Street, 2004). Subsequently, the phenotypic evaluation of these sub-sets and crossing of the best landraces can be streamlined to release new pre-breeding lines to breeders within three years. The use of Spontaneum is more complex due to the transfer of undesirable traits, such as brittle rachis and lodging. However, Spontaneum has been shown to harbour greater genetic diversity than landraces and is a valuable pool of novel alleles for targeted traits, such as drought and salinity tolerance. Most challenging is the utilization of wild relatives, which cannot be evaluated before crossing nor selected via FIGS. Crosses with Bulbosum are difficult and have been mainly achieved in the 80s by Pickering (Wendler et al., 2015). By testing the Bulbosum derived accessions from Pickering in multi-location field trials across Morocco we discovered that certain introgressions improve performance under drought, heat, and low input soil conditions.

To tackle the future challenges of ever more extreme environmental stresses and novel biotic diseases, we must improve our current methods for identification and use of crop wild relatives. At ICARDA, we are expanding our ability to make wide crosses, incorporate novel breeding tools, and use the available diversity of the CWANA region to accelerate pre-breeding.

Biography: Anna joined ICARDA as researcher for cereal pre-breeding. She is originally from Germany, where she gained her master’s in plant sciences from University Bonn. She completed her PhD at the John Innes Centre, studying the molecular networks in control of cell growth in spikelet development. At ICARDA, she is looking at how to maximize the use of diverse germplasm in breeding programs. Her work focuses on accelerating the identification and introgression of useful gene bank material. While landraces can be readily used as donors of new resistance genes, the work with crop wild relatives is complicated by crossing barriers. However, wild introgressions have shown great potential in breeding for dry areas. Working for farmers in developing countries of North Africa and West Asia, her aim is to find new genetic resilience to stresses in this region, especially heat, drought, and biotic factors. Furthermore, Anna is currently leading a project to advance the application and use of novel genomic tools in breeding and pre-breeding programs of ICARDA. Her work is driven by the believe that only through broadening our germplasm diversity, and also our research staff diversity, we can succeed in future crop improvement.