IGI Seminar Series: Recombining Genomes and Alleles for Zooming in on Adaptive Value of Clock Rhythmicity in Barley

Summary

Join us to learn about genetic solutions for crop yields that have been impacted by the current and near-future effects of global warming. This seminar, led by Eyal Fridman in the Plant Sciences Institute at the Agricultural Research Organization (ARO) in Isreal, will cover his research on naturally occurring nucleotype and plasmotype variation within barley (Hordeum vulgare and wild ancestor H. spontaneum) as a model system. He will also show how his lab integrates genomics and high-throughput phenomics analysis for circadian clock and life history phenotypes to find new gene alleles underlying adaptation to heat and drought. Later, he will discuss how they are developing and implementing RECAS9, a CRISPR/CAS9-mediated QTL mapping, and also describe new, exciting results from exploring cytonuclear interactions and their impact on clock and fitness plasticity in new interspecific wild-cultivated populations. The seminar will also cover two new collaborative projects with UC Berkeley and UC Riverside that aim to recombine plasmotype and nucleotype alleles by classic and genome editing approaches and test their impact on barley yield in Israeli and California fields. Read more about his research here.

Join us for the live event on Zoom. All participants and hosts are required to sign into a Zoom account prior to joining meetings.

Speaker

Eyal Fridman —Eyal Fridman is a Senior Researcher in the Plant Sciences Institute at the Agricultural Research Organization (ARO) in Isreal. His lab explores the triangle Environment-Genotype-Phenotype while observing both the source and sink organs that regulate grain yield. They develop genomic infrastructure (wild B1K collection & the interspecific wild-cultivated cytoplasmic multi-parent CMPP population) and phonemics tools (SensyPAM). These resources allow the scanning of barley genomes in search of the needles in the haystack (genes) that mediate these interactions. Furthermore, they develop and implement genome editing tools (RECAS9) to recombine alleles from the wild and cultivated backgrounds to allow pinpointing of causal variation that regulates the source-sink relationship under abiotic stresses.