(upbeat music)
-: Hi.
We're in a hybrid wheat yield trial.
Every one of these plots
is either the parent of the hybrid or the hybrid itself.
The hybrid was made with a chemical hybridizing agent.
To me this is where the magic begins.
This is a hybrid crossing block, not a yield trial,
but a crossing block
where we're making new hybrids
for the next year's yield trials.
What we have is a male, then a female,
and then another male.
Now in this crossing block,
the male is the same up until you see
the very tall plants,
which are are the triticales,
and that marks the end of this set of crosses.
But each female is different,
and what I really like is because we timed these properly
and the chemical worked properly,
if you look at this, each one of the females
is gaping and has that real yellow-green cast to it.
They're ready to receive pollen.
The male is pollinating,
so hopefully we're gonna get hybrid seed,
fairly good yields.
And that's what we have here.
So this is where we make our new hybrids for testing.
And this is what make the chemical hybridizing agent
so critical for us,
is we can sterilize virtually any female line
so that we can make a hybrid with it.
And then if we see a hybrid we want,
we can convert it to a cytoplasmic male sterile
or we could try to make it with CHA,
something like that.
And if you pan across,
you will see we have a whole series
of these crossing blocks separated
so that there are, we're gonna make about,
I think, 360 new hybrids this year.
And these are all basically ones
we would predict from our best estimate
of last year's yields and the previous year's yields
and the genomics that we have to understand the lines.
So this is the hybrid crossing block
using a chemical hybridizing agent,
and it's worked so far, we think, really well.
We'll see what the yield looks like
at the end of the season, but so far,
everything's looking really, really nicely.
(upbeat music)
So what we have here is to give you an idea
of how the chemical hybridizing agent works
and how critical it is to put it on at the exact right time.
Here is a male fertile line that is unsprayed,
and you can see the anthers extruding,
and it looks very much like normal wheat.
The next plot over, now this plot is a plot
that was sprayed with the chemical hybridizing agent
at the right time.
You can see that it's a little bit stunted.
That's normal.
You can also see that the heads
look very wide open.
That's called gaping.
What happens is when you male sterilize the line,
the female discovers it's not being fertilized
and opens the glumes to receive pollen.
So to see a whole strip of plants
completely sterilized by the chemical hybridizing agent
is a really nice sight to see
for someone working on hybrid wheat.
So that's what we're looking at here,
is females that are receptive
to get new pollen to make hybrids.
The male has been sterilized so it will not self,
which is what wheat would normally do.
And we can do it on a scale
which we've never seen before in Nebraska.
(upbeat music)
Now this is the exact same variety
as the first two that we've shown you,
but this is one where we sprayed
the gametocide on too early.
We deliberately did this because we wanted to get an idea
of how the gametocide works,
what's its window of application is.
And you can see that if you spray it on too early
at the same dose you do on a larger plant,
you can get a lot of phytotoxicity.
The plants are probably sterile
but they may also be female, sterile, or barren.
There's a lot of difficulties with that.
It just shows you the care that you need to use
this chemistry with, but again, it's a phenomenal chemistry
in that we can make hybrids to test,
which we just showed in the hybrid testing trials.
And this is the easiest way to make them.
What we have here are CMS lines
that are sprayed with the CHA from this direction down.
From this direction that way, it's the CMS lines unsprayed.
And what we're curious about is to see
how the yield differs between CMS lines that are sprayed,
CMS lines that are unsprayed,
with the idea that the difference should be due
to any phytotoxicity with the chemical.
Now looking at the CMS lines we can see
that we did bring in a few fertiles when we combined,
which will be sterile in here, fertile in there.
So it will be not a quite a perfect comparison,
but it's a reasonable comparison to make.
So we're gonna try to get an idea
of how much does the CHA hurt our lines
and how much can we do when with the CMS type of program?
So what we have here
is a CMS female
that has been sprayed with the CHA.
The idea being if it's sterile already,
then the reduction in seeds set
will be due to the spraying of the CHA,
because it is slightly phytotoxic.
You can see it's a little bit shorter.
We have a common male on both sides.
If you turn around
you will see what the CMS looks like unsprayed,
and that unsprayed plot
unfortunately has a few fertiles into it,
so it's not quite a direct comparison.
But it's a reasonable comparison to see
what CMS sterility with pollination to make hybrids
compares to CMS that has been sprayed with CHA
so the main effect is the effect of the CHA
on how much seed yield you get.
(upbeat music)