Identifiction of root morphology mutants in barley

In this study, a forward-genetics analysis was performed on a portion of TILLMore, a chemically mutagenized population of barley cv. ‘Morex’ (http://www.distagenomics.unibo.it/TILLMore/), to identify root morphology alterations by comparison with ‘Morex’ wild-type. For this purpose, a simple paper-roll approach was performed to identify phenotypic variants at the seedling stage. The analysis of c. 1000 M4 families allowed us to identify c. 70 lines with altered root morphology. A more accurate phenotypic characterization of a portion of the mutant lines has been performed using stereomicroscopy and a scanning electron microscopy approach.