Breeding ProgramTurning the crank on our breeding program is a major part of what we do every year. Annually, we make crosses, evaluate thousands of new seedlings, propagate and advance promising lines, make selections, screen for disease resistance, and distribute hops to brewers for further evaluation. We use traditional breeding methods and are working to implement marker assisted selection and genomic prediction. Major traits of interest include disease resistance, agronomics, yield, and brewing and aroma characteristics.
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Disease ResistancePowdery mildew (caused by the pathogen Podosphaera macularis) is a major challenge for our producers. We are screening for novel sources of resistance across a collection of male hop germplasm, studying the genetic control of resistance across a set of resistant male hop plants using a multi-parent population, and validating a molecular marker for resistance in a field environment. These projects are in close collaboration with our USDA-ARS colleagues Dr. Dave Gent and Dr. John Henning, and their teams, in Corvallis, OR.
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Breeding EfficiencyWe are exploring ways to expedite the typically long and arduous process of cultivar development in hop. We are evaluating the various selection environments (variable spacing and trellis configurations) to determine the optimal stages at which to select for different traits of interest. We also developed a cheap and easy-to-use molecular marker associated with hop sex to identify male hop plants prior to planting our seedling yard as a way to increase efficiency, enable variable selection intensity within the sexes, and to optimize planting locations for evaluation. The male marker project is in collaboration with our colleague Dr. Nahla Bassil (USDA-ARS) and her team at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, OR. We are also in the process of collecting data to inform genomic prediction models and have hopes and dreams of incorporating them into the program in the near future.
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Germplasm EvaluationWe have several ongoing collaborative and internal efforts to evaluate germplasm for a variety of traits, including but not limited to: mite tolerance, virus/viroid tolerance, flowering time, cone morphological characteristics, and chemistry profiles. Our program houses diverse, replicated collections of over 900 females and 300 males which are currently being comprehensively evaluated to identify useful variation for breeding.
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Tools for BreedingWe are interested in developing tools to improve data collection in hop breeding. We identified the need to quantify hop cone morphological traits in our program and worked with Dr. Devin Rippner (USDA-ARS) and Dr. Collins Wakholi to develop an efficient method for quantifying hop cone characteristics in images. The tool is called the HopBox and was published open access in the Plant Phenome. We're currently working on Version 2 to expand into more traits, including cross sections of hop cones.
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Completed Projects
Our completed projects can be accessed on on our Google Scholar or GitHub.