Research Team Seeks to Accelerate Triticale Breeding Processes

Monday, July 18, 2022
Pascal Izere, masters student in BSE, launches an autonomous drone photographing a field of triticale at the research fields at 84th and Havelock. Biological Systems Engineering fieldwork with drones for phentotyping fields. June 27, 2022.  Photo by Craig Chandler / University Communication
Pascal Izere, masters student in BSE, launches an autonomous drone photographing a field of triticale at the research fields at 84th and Havelock. Biological Systems Engineering fieldwork with drones for phentotyping fields. June 27, 2022. Photo by Craig Chandler / University Communication

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate student team is working to speed up breeding processes by using high-throughput phenotyping.

Catherine Mick, graduate research assistant with the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, said this could help fix a “bottleneck” in the triticale breeding program she works in. Triticale is a man-made wheat-by-rye hybrid species used for grain, forage and cover cropping.

This issue comes from the time it takes to evaluate and select the best genetic crosses of the crops breeders are working with.

"Breeding is a numbers game; the more crosses you make, the higher the probability of finding the genotype you’re looking for,” she said. “High-throughput phenotyping offers the possibility of increasing the volume of breeding we can do and improve the efficiency of this step in the breeding process.”

The project is funded by High Intensity Phenotyping Sites (HIPS), a three-year multidisciplinary grant. The overall goal of the HIPS project is to establish two complementary high intensity phenotyping sites at UNL and Texas A&M University, focusing on corn and wheat. Faculty members leading this project are Dr. Katherine Frels, Yufeng Ge, Yeyin Shi, James Schnable, and Mick’s advisors Leah Sandall and Don Lee.

Students in the HIPS project work in a variety of disciplines including biological systems engineering, breeding, coding and more. Mick's group is working to incorporate drones into crop-related research.

“The project as a whole is trying to bring together agriculture and engineering because there’s a lot of technology we can use in the ag world — it’s just a matter of developing it and seeing if it works,” Mick said.  

The group’s goal is to see if multispectral sensors can predict forage yield in triticale. This would be helpful by not only accelerating the breeding process, but also helping during inclement growing seasons.

“If we lose trials to bad weather, we can use that model to predict yield,” she said. “It could help us decide if we want to move trials forward if we lose them to hail or animals or other reasons.”

This growing season, the research team faced a line of severe thunderstorms that brought strong winds and hail, which destroyed some research plots.

"Unfortunately, any data these plots would have provided is gone,” If we can use high-throughput phenotyping to develop a model that can predict yield... we could still use flights from earlier in the season to predict what the forage yield for these lost plots would have been.” 

The data gathered in this project will determine if forage yield can be predicted by calculating Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a parameter to see how healthy the plants are.

“My project specifically is trying to take the technology and seeing if it’s useful in plant breeding,” she said.

Next steps for the group are to process the images, pull the NDVI, and make sure the data gathered from drones is accurate. After that they will make a prediction model to test on other crops and see if yields can be predicted accurately.

Mick plans to graduate with a Master’s degree in Agronomy in August 2023. After graduating with a major in science education, she pivoted into agronomy for her master’s program and hasn’t looked back since. In particular, she enjoys the diversity of topics she gets to work with.

“The nature of my research projects exposes me to three different worlds – plant breeding, engineering, and education,” she said. “I enjoy that I get to dive into all these different areas bridging the gap between technology and agriculture and then share that with the world.”