Category: Breeding

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Nagoya marches on in the EU

It seems that an attempt by Dutch and German plant breeders to get the EU to reconsider its ratification of the Nagoya Protocol has been unsuccessful. The breeders had said that the regulation…

…was insufficiently clear and created disproportionate red tape and additional expenses for their businesses.

Ouch. But what of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture? Wouldn’t the quite different access and benefit sharing system it established alleviate at least some of the breeders’ concerns? Well, maybe.

Regarding other avenues for plant breeders specifically, Article 2(2) of the Regulation in principle allows an exemption for genetic resources for which alternative “access and benefit-sharing” mechanisms are governed by “specialised international instruments”. Some commentators have argued that this could in theory allow at least some plant breeders to evade ((Probably not the most appropriate word to use here, I suspect. Ed.)) the Nagoya Protocol using the benefit-sharing procedures of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, as some industry leaders have also suggested. However, it remains untested, whether such an exemption would be upheld in practice.

To which I would say: why don’t the breeders in question do that testing? I’m not sure whether any of the ones involved in querying Nagoya specialize in breeding for organic agriculture, ((Coincidentally, this all to unusual approach to the deployment of wheat diversity for organic conditions popped up as I was writing this post.)) but if it’s true what they’re saying about “additional expenses,” the new regulations would hit that segment particularly hard. A recent report points out that:

Organic plant breeding is of common interest and requires long-term funding. It is a common good with socio-environmental benefits greater than are mirrored by the modest royalties of its market value.

All the more reasons to test the International Treaty, and indeed make sure it works. Incidentally, recommendation 6 of the report (p. 19) will resonate with breeders — organic, and not so much — everywhere. And it might also be extended to genebanks (which unfortunately the report doesn’t mention):

Public awareness about the importance of plant breeding should be dramatically enhanced. It is literally in everybody’s best interest to develop an awareness of the foundational role that seeds play in health and nutrition. Since this topic is not always easy to communicate, new forms of communication should be sought. Hitherto, only breeders have been pushing for organically bred plant varieties, now consumers should start pulling retailers to further develop the market.

Meanwhile, various stakeholderts are gearing up to enforce the new rules, and monitor compliance, for example in the UK. The International Treaty came into force years ago in the EU, but I don’t recall frantic meetings being organized at the time to cope with it.

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An evolving genebank in farmers’ fields

News that the Organic Research Centre has launched the ORC Wakelyns Population, an unusual new wheat “variety”, inspired Dr Salvatore Ceccarelli to write this blog post for us about his own efforts in a similar vein. He describes a different breeding paradigm, one based on providing farmers with lots of diversity, rather than with a single Next Big Thing.

One of the global issues most frequently debated today is the loss of biodiversity. What’s not often mentioned is that this can happen within agricultural as well as natural ecosystems, and that it can then have an effect on the ability of farmers to adapt to climate change, on food security and on human health.

In 2008, at ICARDA, we dusted off the old idea of evolutionary breeding ((Suneson, C. A. (1956) An evolutionary plant breeding method. Agronomy J. 48:188-191)) to bring biodiversity back into farming systems. We made large, widely diverse populations of barley, bread wheat and durum wheat by mixing lots of F2 lines. And I mean lots: 1600 in the case of barley, 2000 in the case of bread wheat and 700 for durum wheat. The populations went to different countries, including Jordan, Algeria, Eritrea, Iran, and lately even Italy. In Ethiopia, a specific population was made based more specifically on Ethiopian germplasm.

sicily wheat

The objective was to provide farmers with what could be defined as an evolving gene bank. Because of natural crossing, the seed which is harvested from these populations is never genetically the same as what was sown. In other words, the populations evolve continuously, becoming progressively better adapted to the conditions (soil, climate and agronomy) in which they are grown — and in the long term to climate change.

We thought that as the populations evolved, farmers would be able to use them as a source from which to select, possibly with the participation of scientists, ever better adapted varieties. However, it went further than that. Iranian farmers started reporting that the evolutionary populations could themselves be used as crops, as they were high yielding, stable and did not require chemical protection against pests. As a result, the evolutionary populations of barley and wheat spread through 17 provinces in Iran, and new evolutionary populations are being established in rice and corn.

But perhaps the best finding was the one made by Iranian bakers: the bread made with the evolutionary population of bread wheat soon became a commercial success, not only because of its taste and flavour, but also because it was tolerated by people affected by allergies.

iranian bread

We are now having the same experience in Italy, where evolutionary populations of barley, durum wheat and bread wheat are grown in several regions: in Marche, bread made with the flour of the bread wheat population is now in great demand.

pizza and bread

And an evolutionary population of zucchini, of all things, is currently grown by an organic farmer and new populations are being formed in beans and lettuce.

All these cases show that cultivating diverse populations can combine increasing biodiversity in farmers’ fields, adapting crops to climate change, and producing more, healthier, tastier food.

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Brainfood: Weed collection, Japan vs China wheat, China wheat, Indian maize, Aromatic rice, African cattle, Food system vulnerabilities, SDGs & nutrition, Suitable days, Setaria phenotyping

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Nibbles: Monocultures redux, Seedless watermelons, Red kiwifruit, Herbaria problems, Forest foods, Sorghum beer, SIRGEALC, Chinese veggies, Organic tomatoes, Andean women, Rise origins, Fermentation

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Potato wild relatives: Too much of a good thing?

ResearchBlogging.orgWhat do you call it when you suddenly notice things you didn’t notice that much before, and wrongly assume that their frequency has increased? Is it apophenia? Observational selection bias? I’m sure it’s a thing, though I can’t remember its name. And I’m sure it’s frequency is increasing. Meta-apophenia is rampant, I tell you. Yesterday there was that bunch of papers on plant-pest co-evolution. Today two papers on cytoplasmic diversity in potato. I mean: what are the odds? ((Especially when combined with a pean to the crop in National Geographic.))

Anyway. One paper looked at 1,217 European cultivars and breeding clones, ((Sanetomo R, & Gebhardt C (2015). Cytoplasmic genome types of European potatoes and their effects on complex agronomic traits. BMC plant biology, 15 PMID: 26112802)) the other at 978 accessions, breeding lines and varieties used or released by the breeding programme of the International Potato Centre (CIP). ((Mihovilovich, E., Sanetomo, R., Hosaka, K., Ordoñez, B., Aponte, M., & Bonierbale, M. (2015). Cytoplasmic diversity in potato breeding: case study from the International Potato Center Molecular Breeding, 35 (6) DOI: 10.1007/s11032-015-0326-1)) The potato comes in 6 types of maternally-inherited cytoplasmic genomes: M, P, A, W, T and D. The use of the wild species Solanum demissum and S. stoloniferum in parental line and variety development around the world, due to the fact that they have some good pathogen resistance genes, has led to the prevalence of a couple of these. The papers report that 83% and 87% of the CIP and European material respectively had T or D cytoplasm types. In general, the CIP breeding programme was more diverse than the European, but not by all that much. Neither set of authors did the calculation, but the Shannon-Wiener diversity indeces were 0.42 for Europe and 0.58 for CIP, for what that’s worth.

Does it matter? Yes. Quite apart from the disadvantages of the resulting increasing genetic uniformity, these cytoplasm types are concidentally associated with male sterility. That makes them difficult to use in breeding.

…we found that CIP’s breeding germplasm as many others worldwide has experienced a genetic bottleneck in terms of cytoplasmic diversity and continuous incorporation of D- and W/c-type cytoplasms due to the unintended and continuous use of cytoplasmic-based male-sterile maternal lineages in its breeding program. Presumably, CIP breeding activity has already been hindered to a certain extent by sterility problems… CIP functions as a source for distributing breeding germplasm worldwide. Our results show that most of the CIP material distributed to developing countries has T- and D-type cytoplasm. Breeders in developing countries may experience breeding constraints imposed by pollen sterility associated with these cytoplasm types.

So it matters, but there’s a way out.

Nonetheless, male-fertile T-type breeding lines must have contributed to alleviate the problem, thus enabling progress for multiple traits in CIP breeding populations.

And also, D-type germplasm is not all bad. Both it and the M-type were positively correlated with late blight resistance, according to the Europe paper.

So, as ever, swings and roundabouts. Crop wild relatives can be really useful, but you have to careful not to get carried away.