Whole genome-based pre-breeding for climate-resilient Vicia varieties
(contact: Prof. Cécile BEN, C.Ben@skoltech.ru, In the frame of international collab.)

Legumes not only provide crucial proteins for food and feed but also contribute to environmental benefits by improving nutrient cycles, reducing erosion, and addressing resource scarcity. The objective of this PhD thesis is to comprehensively characterize the genetic diversity of three Vicia species, namely faba bean (Vicia faba), common vetch (V. sativa) and Narbon vetch (V. narbonensis). This will allow to optimize their utilization to create more resilient agroecosystems in combination with cereals, to cope with the future environmental challenges in the context of climate change.

The objectives of this project include:

  1. To characterize the genetic diversity within Vicia narbonensis germplasm by analysing high-throughput genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) data.
  2. To perform statistical analysis of phenotypic data obtained from Multi-Environmental Trials (MET) (for V. faba and V. narbonensis species.
  3. To carry out experiments to analyse the response to emerging diseases in controlled conditions within the collection of V. sativa.
  4. To conduct Genome-wide Association study to reveal the genetic architecture of major agronomical traits of interest (for all three Vicia species).
  5. To develop molecular markers associated with QTL identified by GWAS to help in breeding (for all three Vicia species).
  6. To implement genomic prediction for complex traits (for all three Vicia species).
Phenotypic data from MET (3 to 4 successive years) are provided by international partners.

Required skills: Bio-computational analysis of NGS datasets (incl. de novo sequence alignment, SNP calling), Biostatistics (incl. GLM and MLM), Quantitative genetics incl. (GWAS, genomic prediction), molecular biology (for molecular markers development), and knowledge of plant breeding (incl. Multi-environmental trials data analysis and GXE analysis).

Deadline for application: April 15, 2024