Life Sciences Commons^™

Leaf Angle Extractor: A High-Throughput Image Processing Framework For Leaf Angle Measurements In Maize And Sorghum, Sunil Kumar Kenchanmane Raju, Miles Adkins, Alex Enersen, Daniel Santana De Carvalho, Anthony J. Studer, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Patrick S. Schnable, James C. Schnable

Center for Plant Science Innovation: Faculty and Staff Publications

PREMISE: Maize yields have significantly increased over the past half-century owing to advances in breeding and agronomic practices. Plants have been grown in increasingly higher densities due to changes in plant architecture resulting in plants with more upright leaves, which allows more efficient light interception for photosynthesis. Natural variation for leaf angle has been identified in maize and sorghum using multiple mapping populations. However, conventional phenotyping techniques for leaf angle are low throughput and labor intensive, and therefore hinder a mechanistic understanding of how the leaf angle of individual leaves changes over time in response to the environment.

METHODS …

Benchmarking Impact Of Nitrogen Inputs On Grain Yield And Environmental Performance Of Producer Fields In The Western Us Corn Belt, Fatima A.M. Tenorio, Eileen L. Mclellan, Alison J. Eagle, Kenneth G. Cassman, Daryl Andersen, Marie Krausnick, Russell Oaklund, John Thorburn, Patricio Grassini

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Benchmarking crop yields against nitrogen (N) input levels can help provide opportunities to improve N ferti-lizer efficiency and reduce N losses on maize in the US Corn Belt by identifying fields most likely to benefit from improved N management practices. Here, we evaluated a large producer database that includes field-level data on yield and applied N inputs from 9280 irrigated and rainfed fields over a 7-year period (2009–2015) in Nebraska (USA). A spatial framework, based on technology extrapolation domains, was used to cluster each field into spatial units with similar climate and soil type that represent 1.3 million ha of …

Genome-Wide Identification And Analysis Of Heterotic Loci In Three Maize Hybrids, Hongjun Liu, Qin Wang, Mengjiao Chen, Yahui Ding, Xuerong Yang, Jie Liu, Xiaohan Li, Congcong Zhou, Qilin Tian, Yiqi Lu, Danlin Fan, Junpeng Shi, Lin Zhang, Congbin Kang, Mingfei Mingfei Sun, Fangyuan Li, Yujian Wu, Yongzhong Zhang, Baoshen Liu, Xiang Yu Zhao, Qi Feng, Jinliang Yang, Bin Han, Jinsheng Lai, Xian Sheng Zhang, Xuehui Huang

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Heterosis, or hybrid vigour, is a predominant phenomenon in plant genetics, serving as the basis of crop hybrid breeding, but the causative loci and genes underlying heterosis remain unclear in many crops. Here, we present a large-scale genetic analysis using 5360 offsprings from three elite maize hybrids, which identifies 628 loci underlying 19 yield-related traits with relatively high mapping resolutions. Heterotic pattern investigations of the 628 loci show that numerous loci, mostly with complete–incomplete dominance (the major one) or overdominance effects (the secondary one) for heterozygous genotypes and nearly equal proportion of advantageous alleles from both parental lines, are the …