Improving Corn Grain Yield Through Grain Yield Component Traits
In 2012, Minnesota corn growers produced corn on nearly 9M acres statewide, and harvested approximately 1.4 billion bushels of grain. These yields are in part attributable to the fact that breeding efforts in corn to date have focused largely on increasing grain yield. While dramatic improvements have been made, the ceiling for grain yield has not been reached. Understanding the genetic basis of corn grain yield and yield component traits and exploiting that knowledge through commercial varieties is essential to continual yield improvements in the future. Corn has vast genetic resources to explore natural and artificial variation for grain yield and yield components, the latter generally have a higher heritability than grain yield per se. The specific objectives of this project are to 1) Evaluate mutant stocks of seed size candidate genes for phenotypic effects on seed traits, 2) Evaluate transcriptional variation for seed size candidates, 3) Evaluate the relationship between yield component traits and per hectare grain yield, and 4) Dissecting the genetic architecture underlying yield component traits.
Funding provided by the Minnesota Corn Research and Promotion Council
