The availability of high quality cereal seeds is a necessity for efficient and resilient agricultural production, particularly in a future with more variable weather patterns and less predictable growth conditions. Phenotyping seed quality is currently limited to time consuming and labour-intensive germination tests that often overestimate seed performance in the field and throttles progress in seed technology development as a result. This project uses barley as a model species for cereals and aims to investigate the observed link between long-lived mRNA and miRNA stored in seeds during maturation on the mother plant and the vigor of those seeds, a trait more indicative of quality than standard germination tests. To do this, barley grown under controlled conditions and subsequently exposed to different levels of abiotic stress, post-anthesis, will be phenotyped and sequenced using mRNA-seq and sRNA-seq. The transcriptomic data from this will be used to identify species correlated with seed vigor and further characterization of them will be performed using CRIPSR/Cas9 gene editing. Identifying specific RNA associated with seed vigor could potentially enable faster and cheaper tests to assess seed quality. Such tests are projected to strengthen Swedish agriculture and facilitate progress in seed technologies reliant on good quality seed.