SELECTIVELY IMPROVING STRAINS OF SUGAR KELP Saccharina latissima FOR FOOD AND FUEL

As part of ARPA-E's MARINER program, we are  pursuing a selective breeding program to improve the productivity and composition of  Saccharina latissima,  which could serve as feedstock for biofuels.  A MARINER  goal is to develop tools and a pathway toward low-cost (< $8 0/DWT) feedstock that could  ultimately  supply 10% of US liquid transportation fuels.  In our progress to date,  USDA/Cornell and HudsonAlpha have employed PacBio and Illumina sequencing to create a deep-sequenced reference genome and establish a variant catalog for our founding populations and families. WHOI, UCONN and GreenWave have started a second season of field trials of hundreds of founding families. Each family consists of hundreds of  unique sporophytes resulting from crosses generated from hundreds of  microscopic  gametophytes isolated from  more than a  dozen wild collections in New England . These families were planted in "common garden" farm arrays over two seasons (2018 and 2019) in New Hampshire and Connecticut . Analysis of our phenotypic and genotypic r esults  will be  presented along with our progress in identifying variants significantly associated with primary productivity and composition traits. One  project  goal is to develop methods to predict offspring  (sporophyte)  performance based up on genotype  and breeding values of parents (gametophytes) for rapid cycle breeding approaches and to improve the efficiency on-farm testing . Ultimately, our goal is to select sugar kelp best suited genetically  for  offshore farm environments and possessing qualities of 10%  increased dry matter yield per unit area per generation, and improved composition for use as a bioenergy feedstock.