Pre-breeding and population improvement to increase the genetic diversity of breeding germplasms at Dryland Agricultural Research Institute (DARI)

Pre-breeding refers to all activities and strategies designed to identify desirable characteristics or genes from gene bank materials to extend the genetic diversity of breeding germplasm. Since these martial could not be used directly in the breeding program because the genes of interest may be tightly linked to unfavorable genes. Pre-breeding is a bridge between unadapted materials and a breeding program. Hundreds of national and international winter wheat and lentil accessions, landraces, synthetic derivative lines, wild species have been evaluating at Dryland Agricultural Research Institute (DARI) every year. For winter wheat, 13 and 48 pre-breeding F1, F2 segregating populations, respectively, are under evaluation in Maragheh, and 118 pre-breeding F3 populations are in Maragheh and Zanjan in 2020-21. For the pre-breeding winter wheat crossing block, 97 landraces from Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iran have been planted in the greenhouse in 2020-21 and crosses are in the process to develop pre-breeding lines. Also, 150 winter wheat landraces are screening for desirable traits under rainfed conditions in Maragheh. For lentil crop, 200 landraces, collected from cold regions of East Azerbaijan, are evaluating for desirable traits such as plant height, erect type, large seed, green hull color, and earliness under rainfed conditions at DARI in 2020-21. In the lentil crossing block program 47 crosses have been made and 63 F1 generations were collected. Because of climate change and diverse environments of rainfed areas, DARI is designing a very comprehensive pre-breeding program to explore the valuable genetic diversity of gene bank material including, landraces, accessions, local varieties, wild relatives of winter wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea crops. Eventually, to reduce the time required for cultivar development, the speed breeding program integrated into the pre-and breeding program which reducesthe time by three to five years