Mascher Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2020

Edaphic adaptation in barley wild relatives and its transfer to the domesticate

Wild relatives of domesticated plants have long been recognized as important sources of beneficial traits for crop improvement. Having diverged millions of years ago from the domesticate, they have evolved adaptations to more diverse habitats, potentially representing a much wider genetic diversity than could be captured by intraspecific diversity in a crop and its direct wild progenitor. However, concomitant sequence and karyotype divergence have made crop-wild relatives inaccessible to the cross-and-select cycles of traditional breeding. Thus, the main obstacles to transferring beneficial traits from wild relatives have been the lack of effective methods for gene isolation and fertility…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.