When: Thu, 14 Nov 2024 14:00 – 15:30 GMT

The International Barley Hub is pleased to announce the next in the 2024 series of seminars: ‘Towards harnessing meiosis in barley’ presented by Stefan Heckmann (Head of the independent research group Meiosis, IPK Gatersleben)

Summary:

Natural genetic variation harnessed during breeding is primarily assured by reciprocal DNA exchanges between homologous chromosomes (crossover, CO) during meiosis. However, in plants including barley (Hordeum vulgare) tight CO regulation results in a limited number of CO that are skewed towards chromosome ends with large portions of the genome kept untapped during breeding.

To rapidly assesses and study meiotic genes in barley, we established barley stripe mosaic virus-induced gene editing (BSMVIGE) in Cas9 expressing plants and multiplex crystal digital PCR (dPCR)-based single pollen nucleus genotyping. BSMVIGE enables to isolate barley plants defective for meiotic genes without the need of stable genetic transformation and single pollen nucleus genotyping enables high throughput assessment of recombination rates without growing segregating offspring populations.

The application of our setup is shown for various meiotic genes in barley demonstrating that the barley recombination landscape can be altered.

Speakers bio:

Stefan has been the head of the independent research group Meiosis at IPK Gatersleben since 2016, currently funded by the ERC, focusing on plant meiosis that generates genetic variation harnessed during plant breeding. Before that, he was a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, in Chris Franklin’s group, working on plant meiotic recombination. He received his PhD in 2013 from Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg for his work on centromeres in mono- and holocentric chromosome plants, conducted under the supervision of Andreas Houben at IPK Gatersleben.