Experimental evolution in barley – 2 decades of natural adaptation to farming systems

Summary

Sustainable food production for a growing world population will pose a central challenge in the coming decades. Organic farming is among the most feasible approaches to achieving this goal if the yield gap to conventional farming can be decreased. However, uncertainties exist whether organic and conventional agro-ecosystems require different breeding strategies.
A heterogeneous spring barley population was established between a wild barley and an elite cultivar to examine this question. The population was divided into two sets and sown into an organic and a conventional agro-ecosystem, without any artificial selection for two decades. A fraction of seeds harvested each year was sown in the following year.
The parents and five generations from both environments up to the 23rd generation were whole-genome pool-sequenced to identify adaptation patterns towards ecosystem and climate conditions in the allele frequency shifts. Additionally, based on previously published QTLs in barley, a meta-data analysis was conducted to link genomic regions' increased fitness to agronomically related traits.