STTR Phase I: Adapting food and energy crops to new climatic conditions: Integrating climate and plant modeling with genetic mapping and plant breeding

小企业技术转让（STTR）第一阶段项目旨在开发新的工具，以便在不断变化的气候和环境条件下更好地预测作物产量，将所需植物性状的表型表达与遗传标记相关联，并使植物育种者能够在不断变化的气候条件下加速新作物和新品种的开发。 植物生长和作物模型可能会受到缺乏详细的环境数据输入和作物生理学详细知识的限制。 将探索一种新的方法，通过使用现有作物作为潜在新作物的数据替代物，大大提高新作物的估计潜力，并估计已知作物在不断变化的环境条件下的表现。 为了确定哪些物种和品种可以作为最佳替代品，将采用综合方法，包括对各种物种范围的基因型的基因组/转录组进行测序和生物信息学分析。基因型将根据其在地理和环境多样性位置的表型表现进行鉴定，从处理过的样品中构建参考基因组指导和/或从头转录组，鉴定遗传标记（SSR和SNP）并解决其在被子植物遗传学中的位置。如果该项目成功，其更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是在不断变化的气候条件下改善粮食和能源作物的生产，这将使消费者受益，并使农民、种子公司、农业投入和服务公司以及食品加工商和分销商获得商业利益。 新作物和新品种的开发对于帮助满足国家和世界的粮食、纤维和能源需求至关重要。全球气候变化和天气多变性的增加意味着，即使是现有的作物也需要进行改良，以便在新的环境条件下表现良好。 使用传统的植物育种可能需要数年的时间来开发新的作物，这些作物经过优化，在特定地区表现良好。 虽然基因组学和遗传图谱的新工具有望大大减少开发新作物所需的时间，但这些工具尚未完全纳入评估植物如何对特定环境条件作出反应以及确定如何分离和开发所需表型表达的遗传决定因素。 在这一拟议项目中，植物生产模型将与基因绘图相结合，以制作工具，使人们能够根据分布在各地的当地环境预测作物产量潜力。

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project proposes to develop new tools that will make it possible to better predict crop yields under changing climatic and environmental conditions, associate phenotypic expression of desired plant traits with genetic markers, and enable plant breeders to accelerate the development of new crops and varieties under changing climatic conditions. Plant growth and crop models may be limited by a lack of detailed environmental data inputs and detailed knowledge of crop physiology. A new approach to greatly improve the estimates potential of new crops will be explored by using existing crops as data surrogates for potential new crops, and to estimate performance of known crops under changing environmental conditions. To identify which species and varieties can serve as the best surrogates, an integrated approach will be utilized involving sequencing the genomes/transcriptomes of various species-wide genotypes and bioinformatics analysis. Genotypes will be identified based on their phenotypic performance in geographically and environmentally diverse locations, building a reference genome guided and/or denovo transcriptomes from treated samples, identifying genetic markers (SSRs and SNPs) and resolving their placement in the angiosperm phylogeny. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project, if successful, will be improvement in the production of food and energy crops under changing climatic conditions, which will benefit consumers and commercially benefit farmers, seed companies, agricultural input and service companies and food processors and distributors. The development of new crops and varieties is essential to help meet the food, fiber and energy needs of the nation and the world. Global climate change and increasing weather variability means that even existing crops will need to be modified to perform well under new environmental conditions. Using traditional plant breeding can take years to develop new crops that are optimized to perform well in specific locations. While the new tools of genomics and genetic mapping hold the promise of greatly reducing the time that it takes to develop new crop, these tools have not yet been fully integrated into assessing how plants respond to specific environmental conditions and determining how to isolate and develop the genetic determinants of desired phenotypic expressions. In this proposed project, plant production models will be integrated with genetic mapping to produce tools that make it possible to project crop yield potentials in the context of local environments as distributed across the landscape.