Current Research Status Report
Objective 1. Because the main outputs from this project are varieties and improved germplasm, we will focus on that and refer the reader to the progress reports for a detailed description of progress.
This year we created breeder’s seed of nine new candidate varieties that are being made available for companies for evaluation. Additionally, 20 lines of great promise were purified. Yield data is currently being analysed and the best of these will be advanced to purified increases to make breeder’s seed in 2020.
Twenty-one hundred units of foundation seed of a new 0.5 RM glyphosate tolerant (GT) variety was produced during 2019 by MCIA. This variety will be released pending approval from the UMN Variety Review Committee in December. If approval is granted, these 2100 units of foundation seed will be made available to seed growers. We know there is great interest GT public varieties so farmers can save seed costs and still have some additional herbicide tools to work with.
Seed was increased for an improved high oleic variety. This variety has greater than 70% oleic acid and normal levels of linolenic acid. Yield and standability of this variety is much better than the previous version, being approximately 90-95% of the check cultivars. Approximately 75 units of foundation seed is available.
The UMN Variety Review Committee meets on December 16. We have four new varieties that are candidates for public release. All of them have greater yield than available public varieties of similar maturity. Three of the four have very good SCN resistance, with the fourth one having both good yield and high protein content (but susceptible to SCN).
It’s difficult to document the impact of the breeding program in terms of acres planted and value of seed harvested because this information is proprietary to our licensees. One way we can document impact is through examination of seed transfers and agreements signed. Below is a summary of those signed since this time last year. The information of the requestor is kept confidential.
? 66 seed requests from private companies were filled. These seed requests include transferring of seed from our program to theirs for evaluation and crossing preceding possible licensure.
? 101 seed requests from public researchers were filled. These requests for transferring seed to public researchers for breeding, for evaluation of resistance to various pests and pathogens, and for molecular genetic studies advancing the technology of soybean improvement.
? 8 invention disclosures were filled out and approved for the disclosure of 20 new varieties for transfer to private companies for possible licensure.
Objective 2. The 2019 State Soybean Variety Trials have been published and are available at www.soybeans.umn.edu. They have also been distributed to MSRPC.
Objective 3. Specifically, we engaged in two activities this summer related to this. First, we again provided germplasm to Dean Malvick for a Rhizoctonia screening. I am a committee member on his students POS committee and actively assist her research by providing germplasm for studies. I am also working with Dean Malvick on putting together a panel of lines for a brown stem rot resistance study he will conduct in the greenhouse over the wintertime.
Breeding for aphid resistance is also a major focus of the program. Through partial funding provided by the LCCMR Minnesota Invasive Pests Center, we are working with Dr. Bob Koch on new aphid-resistant varieties. Eleven advanced breeding lines with confirmed aphid resistance are being tested in regional trials, and hundreds more are in earlier stages of the pipeline. We are hoping to identify some new varieties with stacked resistance in addition to the existing Rag1 variety already available for purchase.
Objective 4. For UAV-enabled ratings of IDC, our 2019 results were similar to those we obtained in 2017. For some studies, we are relying solely on the UAV-based ratings. For others, we still relied on the human visual scores, but a side-by-side comparison of variety averages for human- and UAV-based ratings are very similar. In 2019, we learned several things about how to optimally use this technology for ratings, and we plan to deploy this technology in 2020 using these lessons learned.
We dove head first into using UAVs for scoring maturity date in 2019. We did not have an option for taking ground maturity notes at several northern locations. To circumvent this issue, we purchased two UAVs and hired students through Angie Peltiers to fly them. We used the data from the imagery to predict maturity date, and learned much in terms of practical implementation in the process. Using locations from which we had both good UAV data and good ground scores, we found that we could explain 80% of the variation in ground dates with UAV dates. Moreover, there were as many errors on the ground and through predicting by UAV imagery. We are hoping to using this technology in 2020 for scoring maturity date in yield trials at several sites.