<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=06M3k2_0vBQ4Mgs00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=06M3k2_0vBQ4Mgs00" width="507" height="507" ><figcaption>Mike Giroux, durum breeder and head of the Montana State University (MSU) Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology Department, makes selections that will lead to the kind of durum export markets need.</figcaption></figure>SIDNEY, Mont. – New durum experimentals are growing across the state in side-by-side variety nurseries with released varieties as Mike Giroux, durum breeder and head of the Montana State University (MSU) Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology Department, makes selections that will lead to the kind of durum export markets need.Giroux works with Andy Hogg, a research associate in the department, and has several graduate students who work on traits and identifying new ways to improve varieties.“It’s interesting the impact identifying a marker for a gene has on improving varieties,” Giroux said. “Jason Cook, the spring wheat breeder, is famous because as a grad student, he found a marker for the solid stem trait in wheat. Having a marker can lead to tremendous advances, but it’s not easy. It made a big impact because now we’re able to select for markers for solid stem in wheat.”Caleb Hale, one of Giroux’s graduate students, is two years into his doctorate, and he has been working on researching new alleles that create taller semi-dwarfs and promote tillers for higher durum yields.“Caleb is going to talk about another way to increase tiller numbers besides semi-dwarfs and that is with TB1 mutations,” Giroux said. “Recently, we have been working on semi-dwarfs and making them a little bit taller. We think semi-dwarfs might perform better under low rainfall conditions.”The problem the durum breeding team has been running into is if they cross tall semi-dwarfs with other semi-dwarfs, all the resultant semi-dwarfs produce lower protein.“But we found the intermediate semi-dwarfs have a little bit better protein content, so that is what we are aiming for,” Hale said. Hale said they are creating and testing new semi-dwarfs with increased tillers to reliably increase durum yields.“On a good year, it’s good to have more productive tillers because that increases your number of heads per unit area that have seeds in them, and ideally, it will boost your yield,” he said. “It’s really important that we’re talking about productive tillers, not those little wimpy secondary tillers that come on later. They just suck up extra water.”The gene that Hale is working with increases yield immediately and would ideally boost yields in all the different varieties and types of wheat that they’re working with.Hale said there is a single gene that affects height in a way to develop an intermediate height semi-dwarf. The gene has been reliable in helping the durum team select for lines that are right in the middle – ones that don’t decrease tiller numbers and have good emergence.“It’s easy to select for these newer varieties that maybe we’ve crossed in a special gene that is intermediate between semi-dwarf and full height. This is especially key in durum, where the semi-dwarfs tend to be really short. The full-height ones tend to be pretty tall, so it has been tricky in the past to select for lines that are intermediate,” he said.They are testing the experimentals and it “looks pretty encouraging,” according to Hale. They currently have intermediate lines growing in Sidney and Havre. He is also working on seed treatments that increase plant growth.“It’s a very small amount of these compounds coated as a dry material on the surface of seeds, and it increases plant growth. If you have too much of it, you can kill your plants, but as a seed treatment, you usually can control the amount.”A couple of years ago, Giroux and his team released the durum semi-dwarf, MT Raska, along with the durum, MT Blackbeard.“MT Blackbeard and MT Raska are 2022 releases for us. Raska is a semi-dwarf with good yield, and in a drier year, it does pretty well. It has early flowering, early maturity, and good yield overall,” Giroux said. “Blackbeard has great yield in a very good year. It is probably the best in yield, and it was grown last year at (North Dakota State University), as well, under irrigation, and it was ranked number one in yield. It has very good quality.”In 2023, averaged across all locations, MT Blackbeard had an average yield of 84.8 bushels per acre with a test weight of 62.5 pounds and protein of 13.6 percent. MT Raska averaged a yield of 87.5 bushels per acre with a test weight of 62.5 pounds and protein of 13.6 percent.<h2>People are also reading…</h2>Sawfly pressure is another problem for durum growers, and while MT Raska and MT Blackbeard are not solid stem varieties, they do well in low sawfly pressure.“These varieties have kind of low cutting, but if you have very high sawfly pressure, they can be cut 30 percent, and they’re both hollows,” he said.Giroux pointed out that they have four experimental varieties in development that are solid stems.“We will have solid varieties, as well, which as you know, the solid stem makes a difference,” he said.In the future, Giroux said they will have high-yielding solid stems.“The difficulty with all that is you have all these different genes that you’re trying to integrate together, and it is difficult to end up with the same yield in one variety,” he said. “So, you end up with 10 new varieties. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, so we will have solid stems – they may not be the highest yielding – but they will come out in a few years.”Brandon Tillis, an MSU graduate student, has been working on pre-harvest sprouting in durum. It can happen to durum before harvest after the grain has ripened, and it can happen to swathed durum when it lies in the swath and gets rained on.“Pre-harvest sprout is one of the projects that I work on and it’s not necessarily a huge problem all the time here in Montana, but it occasionally can become a problem. When you get periods of prolonged rainfall and high humidity after the grain has ripened and before it can be harvested, it can contribute to pre-harvest sprouting,” Tillis said. “When we look at this, we rate things on a scale of 1-7 depending on how bad the sprouting occurs. If the rain doesn’t stop, sprout will be a problem later.”Tillis said pre-harvest sprout is controlled by seed dormancy genes.“A previous grad student looked at this in winter wheat and was able to show an effect for different alleles of this gene on how susceptible the plant is to pre-harvest sprout if it gets all of that late-season rain,” he said.The durum team has conducted several trials and they have determined what the differences are for pre-harvest sprout in spring wheat and durum.“We’ve also found a couple of new novel alleles for pre-harvest sprout for this gene. We are soon going to be releasing that information to determine which lines are more susceptible to pre-harvest sprout and which are less susceptible,” he said.If farmers get late-season rains, they can harvest their durum and get it dried before “you start seeing a big, massive negative impact to your quality.”Genes need to get into the important durum varieties, such as Raska or Blackbeard, whether it is a pre-harvest sprout gene, a tillering gene, or any of the other genes the durum team uses.“Raska and Blackbeard – those are the releases we think are going to do really well for everyone, so what we do when we get these alleles of these really important genes is we backcross them into these important lines and see if they improve the plants,” Tillis said. “We don’t want to improve an older variety; we want to improve the varieties that work best right now, and we do that through back-crossing.”Winter durum has not worked out so far for the MSU durum team.“We have tried to work on winter durum planted in the fall. Durum has not been as intensively bred as long as spring wheat, and the genetics just were not there, so we had to move the winter genes over into it to create a winter durum. In our first trials of growing those, none survived Montana winters,” Giroux said.However, a winter durum and many others with different traits will continue to be studied and worked on in the future.Alzada was the leading durum variety grown in Montana during 2023, accounting for 18.5 percent of the 650,000 acres planted. Divide ranks second, totaling 16.8 percent of the durum acres planted in the state. ND Riveland ranks third, totaling 15.3 percent of the durum acres planted. Montana continues to rank second in durum wheat planted acreage in the nation.</div></body>

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MSU durum team developing intermediate height semi-dwarfs

SIDNEY, Mont. – New durum experimentals are growing across the state in side-by-side variety nurseries with released varieties as Mike Giroux, durum breeder and head of the Montana State University (MSU) Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology Department, makes selections that will lead to the kind of durum export markets need.

MSU durum team developing intermediate height semi-dwarfs

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