Research Technician Boyce Thompson Institute Ithaca, New York
Body of Abstract: Tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius), is a close relative of common bean (P. vulgaris), that thrives in dry areas of South-Western United States and North-Western Mexico. To understand genetic components of drought resilience and develop tepary bean resources for breeding, the development of well-genotyped natural diversity panel is required. Here, we developed the tepary bean panel consisting of 152 cultivated and 155 wild accessions. The accessions have been sequenced and used for SNP calling, that enables future Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS). To further our understanding of drought stress responses, we developed a cost-efficient high-throughput phenotyping setup using Raspberry Pi and Arduino to monitor growth rate, evapotranspiration, and photosynthetic efficiency. We observed significant decrease in growth rate under drought stress conditions, compared to control. Interestingly, cultivated accessions showed higher rate of evapotranspiration compared to the wild tepary bean accessions. In the future, the collected data will be used for GWAS to identify candidate regions and genes associated with drought tolerance in tepary bean. This will facilitate development of drought tolerant germplasm and enable the possibilities of introgression into new crops.