Browsing by Person "Schipprack, Wolfgang"

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Can we abandon phosphorus starter fertilizer in maize? Results from a diverse panel of elite and doubled haploid landrace lines of maize (Zea mays L.)
(2022) Roller, Sandra; Weiß, Thea M.; Li, Dongdong; Liu, Wenxin; Schipprack, Wolfgang; Melchinger, Albrecht E.; Hahn, Volker; Leiser, Willmar L.; Würschum, Tobias
The importance of phosphorus (P) in agriculture contrasts with the negative environmental impact and the limited resources worldwide. Reducing P fertilizer application by utilizing more efficient genotypes is a promising way to address these issues. To approach this, a large panel of maize (Zea mays L.) comprising each 100 Flint and Dent elite lines and 199 doubled haploid lines from six landraces was assessed in multi-environment field trials with and without the application of P starter fertilizer. The treatment comparison showed that omitting the starter fertilizer can significantly affect traits in early plant development but had no effect on grain yield. Young maize plants provided with additional P showed an increased biomass, faster growth and superior vigor, which, however, was only the case under environmental conditions considered stressful for maize cultivation. Importantly, though the genotype-by-treatment interaction variance was comparably small, there is genotypic variation for this response that can be utilized in breeding. The comparison of elite and doubled haploid landrace lines revealed a superior agronomic performance of elite material but also potentially valuable variation for early traits in the landrace doubled haploid lines. In conclusion, our results illustrate that breeding for P efficient maize cultivars is possible towards a reduction of P fertilizer in a more sustainable agriculture.
High-resolution association mapping with libraries of immortalized lines from ancestral landraces
(2021) Würschum, Tobias; Weiß, Thea M.; Renner, Juliane; Friedrich Utz, H.; Gierl, Alfons; Jonczyk, Rafal; Römisch-Margl, Lilla; Schipprack, Wolfgang; Schön, Chris-Carolin; Schrag, Tobias A.; Leiser, Willmar L.; Melchinger, Albrecht E.
Landraces are traditional varieties of crops that present a valuable yet largely untapped reservoir of genetic variation to meet future challenges of agriculture. Here, we performed association mapping in a panel comprising 358 immortalized maize lines from six European Flint landraces. Linkage disequilibrium decayed much faster in the landraces than in the elite lines included for comparison, permitting a high mapping resolution. We demonstrate this by fine-mapping a quantitative trait locus (QTL) for oil content down to the phenylalanine insertion F469 in DGAT1-2 as the causal variant. For the metabolite allantoin, related to abiotic stress response, we identified promoter polymorphisms and differential expression of an allantoinase as putative cause of variation. Our results demonstrate the power of this approach to dissect QTL potentially down to the causal variants, toward the utilization of natural or engineered alleles in breeding. Moreover, we provide guidelines for studies using ancestral landraces for crop genetic research and breeding.