9627331 Tadesse The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty- four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will fund a twelve-month postdoctoral research visit which will allow Dr. Nigatu Tadesse to work with Dr. S. Rajaram at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico. The goal of this research is to explain the inheritance of osmoregulation, relative water content, and excised leaf water retention (plant-water relations) as droughtresistance mechanisms in wheat. The objectives are: 1) to identify and map the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) of plantwater relations; and 2) to determine if there is a genetic relationship between plant-water relations traits and yield under water stress environments. The long-term goals of the project are to develop marker-based selection tools to facilitate selection for drought-resistant wheat genotypes and provide a linkage map that will enable map based cloning for plant-water relations genes. ***
