751-3606-00L Molecular Plant Breeding

Semester	Spring Semester 2019
Lecturers	B. Studer, C. Grieder, A. Hund, R. Kölliker
Periodicity	yearly recurring course
Language of instruction	English

Abstract	Molecular tools have significantly contributed to improve the process of plant breeding throughout the last decades. The course Molecular Plant Breeding illustrates - on the basis of lectures, exercises and practical examples - the most important molecular breeding tools (QTL, association studies..) and how these tools are applied to plant breeding by means of marker-assisted or genomic selection.
Learning objective	At the end of the course Molecular Plant Breeding you will be able to: - understand different molecular marker technologies and genotyping methods, and how the generated data can be used for genetic distance measures and multivariate statistics in experimental and natural populations - use the most important molecular breeding tools such as genetic linkage mapping, QTL analysis, genome-wide association studies and to apply these tools to plant breeding by marker-assisted and genomic selection - describe different sequencing technologies and strategies for genome sequencing, transcriptome profiling (RNAseq) and genotyping by sequencing - apply basic bioinformatics tools for sequence data management and comparative genomics (BLAST, simple assemblies, alignments and gene annotations)
Content	The course Molecular Plant Breeding is based on complementing lectures, exercises and practical examples. The examples cover a wide range of species and traits and will be taught by four different experts in the field. A detailed program including dates and specific contents will be provided through Moodle.
Lecture notes	Scripts and slides for each lecture and will be made available through Moodle.
Literature	For each lecture, additional literature covering the topic will be provided.
Prerequisites / Notice	The course will be held at ETH Zentrum (LFW building), where computers will be available for exercises with R or - if necessary - other specific software packages. Attendance of the courses Pflanzenzüchtung and Plant Breeding is recommended; basic understanding of R (as taught in Experimental Design and Applied Statistics in Agroecosystem Science) is advantageous.