AGRON521 (3 cr) Principles of Cultivar Development

Course Description: Theoretical and practical exploration of breeding methods to develop clonal, pureline, inbred and hybrid cultivars. Gain experience in breeding maize, soybean, wheat, rice, potato, sorghum, sunflower, alfalfa, turfgrass, and sugarcane. Principles and strategies to setting breeding objectives; parental selection and germplasm management; population development, generation advancements and breeding methods; multiple trait selection;experimental designs applicable in different stages of a breeding program; seed production and certification; tools available to a breeder including winter nurseries, doubled haploids, marker assisted and genomic selection, high throughput phenotyping, machine learning, genome editing.

Prerequisite: Agronomy 421 and Stat 401 (or equivalent with instructor’s permission)

Course Materials:

Required text

Breeding Field Crops, 5th Edition, David Allen Sleper, John Milton Poehlman, ISBN: 978-0-8138-2428-4, July 2006, Wiley-Blackwell

Rex Bernardo. 2014. Essentials of Plant Breeding. ISBN 978-0-9720724-2-7. Stemma Press.

Other useful text

Rex Bernardo. 2010. Breeding for Quantitative Traits in Plants. 2nd Edition. ISBN 978-0-9720724-1-0. Stemmapress.

Fehr, W.R. 1987. Principles of Cultivar Development, Vol. 1: Theory and Technique.

AGRON 522 (2 cr) Field Methods in Plant Breeding

Course Description: Field experience in planning and conducting plant breeding research for germplasm and cultivar development. Field visits and in-class activities. Field visits include public and private seed company breeding programs. Breeding pureline, inbred line, hybrid, clonal cultivars. Agriculture equipment and instruments relevant to a plant breeding program. Seed production and certification. Gene bank. Plant transformation, doubled haploid, molecular markers.

Prerequisite: Agronomy 521