Rapeseed (Brassica napus) is one of the most recently domesticated major crop species, and due to intensive breeding has become the most important oilseed crop in Europe. Today around 6 M t of seed are produced annually on 1.5 M ha in Germany. Yield per hectare varies in different countries, reflecting different input levels and production efficiency. This highlights the scope for crop improvement, and yield will continue to be the primary focus of many rapeseed improvement programs. Modern varieties are based on a relative small subset of the available genetic diversity. Rapeseed is thus likely to respond strongly to programs aimed at selectively enhancing genetic variation for key economic input and output traits.

The goal of this project is to develop and implement a diverse set of plant materials selected specifically with regard to the project aims, as well as "omics" technologies and precise phenotyping strategies that will be used to enhance rapeseed pre-breeding, subsequent breeding and development of new elite commercial varieties. To create new and well described genetic variation, adapted and exotic rapeseed accessions (landraces, old varieties and re-synthetics) will be integrated in the project. Deep phenotyping will be carried out to study a pre-breeding collection comprising around 50 adapted and exotic genotypes selected from a broad B. napus diversity set. Simulation studies will be used to develop the best crossing design for the detection of rare positive alleles and identification of new quantitative trait loci (QTL) for numerous traits, with a particular focus on yield. Field trials of populations derived from crosses between the selected pre-breeding genotypes and one common elite line will allow validation of interesting phenotypes with respect to yield performance and selection of the best performing genotypes using Nested Association Mapping (NAM). Finally, access to the draft genome sequence of rapeseed, via the industry partners, will facilitate re-sequencing of the pre-breeding collection. For genome wide association studies a high density SNP chip will be developed to genotype the different populations. In future the materials, data and genomic resources will provide a basis for genomic selection in advanced progenies derived from the pre-breeding collection.

Through the selection of excellent complementary partners, we expect to establish a strong pre-breeding consortium in rapeseed and generate considerable amounts of new data and knowledge. The implementation of the project results and the translation of these resources into innovative breeding material and prediction tools for yield in commercial breeding practice is the long term aim of this new pre-breeding platform.

Pre-BreedYield will combine advanced new quantitative genetics techniques in B. napus with deep phenotyping and emerging genomics technologies to generate new plant materials and tools for breeding. To translate these considerations into a research program we have organised a project divided into five work packages (WPs) that study different aspects of yield and yield stability in rapeseed. All these WPs are implemented in a tightly designed network between the partners according to their respective expertise. All partners will interact with each other accordingly within and between these work packages.