Exploration of stress responsive alleles in barley through transposons

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Funds are requested for the establishment of a research program aimed at understanding the function of novel stress responsive genes in cultivated and primitive barley. Biotic and abiotic stresses pose major threats to crop species, causing heavy yield losses worldwide. Barley landraces and wild species represent a large source of variation for several stress related genes that could be introgressed into improved varieties, excluding adverse and un-evolved traits. This requires the identification of novel stress responsive genes to generate plants for better tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. The maize Ac/Ds transposon system has been successfully utilized for mutagenesis in heterologous plant species for gene cloning. Using this system in cultivated barley, we observed important salt responsive Ds mutants phenotypes, providing us a valuable resource for gene identification and characterization. With the demonstrated functionality of the Ac/Ds maize transposon system in cultivated barley and the Ds transposon predilection for insertion in or near genes, it is now possible to introduce the Ac/Ds system into wild barley to explore its natural diversity in stress related genes. We have recently developed a tissue culture and transformation system for wild barley, H. spontaneum which makes our efforts for transposon tagging in wild barley highly promising. We will introduce into H. spontaneum, a transposon-based activation tagging system which is useful to overcome gene redundancy. Taken together, these efforts will lead to possible practical applications for stress tolerance, identification of unique stress responsive genes, better understanding of multiple abiotic stress tolerance regulation including underlying genetic mechanisms of stress adaptation in cultivated and wild barley.