Development of new, molecular marker-based method of detecting seeds of plant species in the soil seed bank can become a tool useful for fundamental and applied research of plant populations. This research is aimed at a practical problem: detection of Apera spica-venti, a weed species that has potential to reduce yield of important cereal crops in Europe and other cereal-growing areas. Conventional methods of soil seed bank analysis are extremely labor-intensive or time-consuming, which is an important limitation to soil seed bank research. The aim of the project is to develop a set of molecular markers for detecting seeds of A. spica-venti in soil samples. To achieve this aim, first, in silico design and selection of primers useful for selective amplification of target species A. spica-venti will be performed. Publicly available datasets with A. spica-venti sequence data will be used for this purpose. Specificity of the designed primers will be tested using DNA isolated from several target weed individuals as well as DNA of other weed and crop species. The performance of the selected primers will be validated using soil samples spiked with A. spica-venti seeds. Two different methods, qPCR and KASP will be used at this stage. This research will extend the use of molecular detection methods in soil seed bank research beyond parasitic weed species and include a Poaceae family species which is an economically important arable weed.