Author: Mike Listman

John R. Porter, noted crop and climate scientist, becomes chairperson of the Independent Steering Committee for global wheat research

Written by Mike Listman on November 8, 2017. Posted in Press releases.

EL BATAN, Mexico (8 November 2017) – Professor Dr. John R. Porter, from the Agropolis/Montpellier Supagro/INRA/CIRAD conglomeration in Montpellier, France, has been elected as Chair of the Independent Steering Committee that advises the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (known as WHEAT) on research strategy, priorities and program management. In this appointment, Porter succeeds Dr Tony Fischer, Honorary Research Fellow, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia.

An internationally recognized researcher and teacher in crop ecology and physiology, biological modelling, and agricultural ecology, Porter’s contributions have focused on climate change, agronomy, and ecosystem services.

“I am very proud and pleased to be elected as chair of the WHEAT Steering Committee. This CGIAR research program connects over 300 partners into a global alliance for climate-resilient and profitable wheat agri-food systems,” Porter said.

“Accounting for a fifth of the world’s food, wheat is the main source of protein in the developing world and is second only to rice as a source of calories for consumers there,” Porter explained. “The challenge for WHEAT is no less than to raise the crop’s productivity and keep wheat affordable for today’s 2.5 billion resource-poor consumers in 89 countries and for a world population that will surpass 9 billion around mid-century.”

Porter observed that this must be done while cutting greenhouse gas emissions and improving soil health, in wheat-based cropping systems. “As WHEAT moves into its 2nd Phase,” he said, “I would like the Independent Steering Committee to continue the work pioneered by my predecessor Tony Fischer and look at some new areas, such as human capacity development and innovation in wheat-based food production systems.”

Meeting wheat demand, protecting food and farming from worsening climate impacts
According to Porter, WHEAT is actively catalyzing the efforts of CGIAR and partner institution scientists, farmers, governments and private companies in lower and middle-income countries, to develop and share climate-smart innovations that increase farm resilience and productivity, while reducing the climate footprint.

Technology such as high-yielding wheat varieties that tolerate drought and high temperatures, as well as resisting new or modified strains of deadly crop diseases spawned in rapidly warming environments, are the outputs from WHEAT research that lead to positive outcomes for farmers and consumers.

Developing such technologies requires that WHEAT also invest in human capacity development. “Varieties derived from WHEAT breeding lines are already sown on nearly half of the world’s wheat lands and which bring economic benefits of about $3.1 billion each year,” Porter said, citing a 2016 analysis of WHEAT impacts.

Resource-conserving cropping practices from WHEAT, such as more targeted use of nitrogen fertilizers or sowing wheat into untilled soils and crop residues, can raise wheat farmers’ incomes while curbing greenhouse gas emissions, if widely adopted, he added. “Zero tillage is already being used to sow wheat on 1.8 million hectares in South Asia’s extensive rice-wheat rotations, and state government officials in India are implementing policies to support more widespread adoption.”

Perfect experience for the job
A member of the WHEAT Independent Steering Committee since 2014, Porter has published more than 140 papers in reviewed journals, won four international prizes for research and teaching, and served as president of the European Society for Agronomy and was Chief Editor of the European Journal of Agronomy for many years. He led the writing of the chapter on food production and security for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment. Porter was elected as both a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy for Agriculture and Forestry and the European Academy of Sciences in 2014 and was knighted by the French government via the Order of Agriculture Merit in March 2016. Porter is an emeritus professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich UK and an honorary professor at Lincoln University, New Zealand. He is a member of the Scientific Council of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) and currently consulting professor at Montpellier SupAgro, France on a project for Capacity Building in Crop Modelling financed by the Agropolis Foundation and Labex Agro.

For more information or interviews:
Mike Listman | Communications officer
CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (http://wheat.org)
tel: +52 (55) 5804 7537

Breaking Ground: Clare Stirling sees no silver bullets to control agriculture’s emissions

Written by Mike Listman on November 1, 2017. Posted in Features.

ClareStirling_Postcard

There are no easy fixes nor can business as usual continue, if humankind is to reduce the climate footprint of global agriculture while intensifying farming to meet rising food demands, according to an international scientist who has studied agriculture and climate interactions for nearly three decades.

“Climate change is a threat multiplier, intensifying the challenges of population growth, food insecurity, poverty, and malnutrition,” said Clare Stirling, a scientist in the sustainable intensification program of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). “With almost 60% of global food production coming from rainfed agriculture and more than 650 million people dependent on rainfed farming in Africa alone, our food system is already highly vulnerable to changing climates.”

Stirling, who is CIMMYT’s liaison with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), believes that agriculture—including smallholder agriculture—can play a key role in meeting greenhouse gas emission targets, but only with combined and coordinated efforts that cross institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

CIMMYT contributes through a systems approach to developing and promoting climate smart technologies—including drought tolerant maize and wheat varieties, conservation agriculture, and precision nutrient and water management—as well as research on climate services, index-based insurance for farmers whose crops are damaged by bad weather, and data and models for greenhouse gas emissions in India and Mexico.

“Take the case of India, the world’s second-largest food producer,” Stirling explained. “Mitigation options for crops, of which rice-wheat systems are a major component, include improved water management in rice, more precise use of nitrogen fertilizer, preventing the burning of crop residues and promoting zero or reduced tillage, depending on local conditions and practices. With the right policies and training for farmers, these options could spread quickly to reduce emissions by as much as 130 Megatons of CO₂e per year from the crop sector alone. The big challenge is achieving large-scale adoption for significant mitigation to occur.”

Science needed for local mitigation targets

Born in Malawi and having spent her early childhood in Zimbabwe, young Stirling also lived a year with her parents and siblings in a house trailer on a farm in Devon, United Kingdom. “Most of my childhood and teen years were spent living in villages, riding horses, and working on farms during school holidays. Out of this came a desire to work in agriculture and overseas.”

Stirling obtained a bachelor’s degree in plant science and a doctor’s degree in environmental crop physiology at Sutton Bonnington, University of Nottingham, U.K., performing fieldwork for the latter at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderbad, India.

As a Ph.D. student at Nottingham, she also joined a research group under the late Professor John Monteith that was quantifying relationships among crop growth, radiation, and water use. The resulting equations underpin many of today’s crop simulation models. “My research since has focused on environmental interactions and crop growth, so climate change became an important part of this, starting with an M.Sc. course on the topic that I set up in Essex University in the 1990s.”

Among the intractable challenges Stirling sees is soil degradation. “Unless this is addressed, it will be impossible to sustainably intensify or build climate resilience into food systems,” she explained. “We must manage limited organic matter and fertilisers better and more efficiently, to achieve healthier soils.”

She is also concerned that the climate science to support national and local climate change adaptation planning is much less certain than that which informs long-term global scale targets. “CIMMYT has an invaluable role with its global and strategic research mandate to develop technologies that will raise productivity and resource use efficiency in future, warmer climates,” Stirling asserted.

“Local climate predictions are likely to remain uncertain and adapting to current climate variability may not be enough for long-term adaptation in many places, with the surprises that may be in store,” Stirling added.

“International organizations such as CIMMYT need to offer stress-tolerant, high-yielding germplasm and sustainable management systems, as well as harnessing big data and digitization, to transform adaptation to deal with future, more extreme climates. Finally, future farmers will need to get the most out of good conditions and good years because, the way things are headed, there may be little hope for coping in bad years.”

Read about research by Stirling and colleagues:

Click here to read “Tek B. Sapkota, Jeetendra P. Aryal, Arun Khatri-Chhetri, Paresh B. Shirsath, Ponraj Arumugam, and Clare M. Stirling. 2017. Identifying high-yield low-emission pathways for the cereal production in South Asia. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change DOI 10.1007/s11027-017-9752-1.

Improved wheat helps reduce women’s workload in rural Afghanistan

Written by Mike Listman on October 12, 2017. Posted in Features.

Afghan women from wheat farming villages in focus-group interviews as part of Gennovate, a global study on gender and agricultural innovation. Photo: CIMMYT archives

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — New research shows improved wheat raises the quality of life for men and women across rural communities in Afghanistan.

A recent report from Gennovate, a major study about gender and innovation processes in developing country agriculture, found that improved wheat varieties emerged overwhelmingly among the agricultural technologies most favored by both men and women.

In one striking example from Afghanistan, introducing better wheat varieties alone reduced women’s work burden, showing how the uptake of technology – whether seeds or machinery – can improve the quality of life.

“Local varieties are tall and prone to falling, difficult to thresh, and more susceptible to diseases, including smuts and bunts, which requires special cleaning measures, a task normally done by women,” said Rajiv Sharma, a senior wheat scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and country liaison officer for CIMMYT in Afghanistan. “Such varieties may comprise mixes of several seed types, including seed of weeds. They also give small harvests for which threshing is typically manual, with wooden rollers and animals, picking up sticks, stones, and even animal excrement that greatly complicates cleaning the grain.”

Both women and men spoke favorably about how improved wheat varieties have eased women’s wheat cleaning work. “Improved seeds can provide clean wheat,” said an 18-year old woman from one of the study’s youth focus groups in Panali, Afghanistan. “Before, we were washing wheat grains and we exposed it to the sun until it dried. Machineries have [also] eased women’s tasks.”

Finally, Sharma noted that bountiful harvests from improved varieties often lead farmers to use mechanical threshing, which further reduces work and ensures cleaner grain for household foods.

Gennovate: A large-scale, qualitative, comparative snapshot

Conceived as a “bottom-up” idea by a small gender research team of CGIAR in 2013, Gennovate involves 11 past and current CGIAR Research Programs. The project collected data from focus groups and interviews involving more than 7,500 rural men and women in 26 countries during 2014-16.

According to estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), if women farmers had the same access to resources as men, agricultural output in developing countries would rise by an estimated average of as high as 4 percent. Photo: CIMMYT archives

Some 2,500 women and men from 43 rural villages in 8 wheat-producing countries of Africa and Asia participated in community case studies, as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat.

“Across wheat farm settings, both men and women reported a sense of gradual progress,” said Lone Badstue, gender specialist at CIMMYT and Gennovate project leader. “But women still face huge challenges to access information and resources or have a voice in decision making, even about their own lives.”

According to estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), if women farmers, who comprise 43 per cent of the farm labor force in developing countries, had the same access to resources as men, agricultural output in 34 developing countries would rise by an estimated average of as high as 4 percent.

“Gender-related restrictions such as limitations on physical mobility or social interactions, as well as reproductive work burden, also constitute key constraints on rural women’s capacity to innovate in agriculture,” Badstue explained.

Gender equity drives innovation

The Gennovate-wheat report identified six “positive outlier communities” where norms are shifting towards more equitable gender relations and helping to foster inclusiveness and agricultural innovation. In those communities, men and women from all economic scales reported significantly higher empowerment and poverty reductions than in the 37 other locations. Greater acceptance of women’s freedom of action, economic activity, and civic and educational participation appears to be a key element.

“In contexts where gender norms are more fluid, new agricultural technologies and practices can become game-changing, increasing economic agency for women and men and rapidly lowering local poverty,” Badstue said.

The contributions and presence of CIMMYT in Afghanistan, which include support for breeding research and training for local scientists, date back several decades. In the last five years, the Agricultural Research Institute of Afghanistan (ARIA) of the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation & Livestock (MAIL) has used CIMMYT breeding lines to develop and make available to farmers seed of 15 high-yielding, disease resistant wheat varieties.

Read the full report “Gender and Innovation Processes in Wheat-Based Systems” here.

GENNOVATE has been supported by generous funding from the World Bank; the CGIAR Gender & Agricultural Research Network; the government of Mexico through MasAgro; Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ); numerous CGIAR Research Programs; and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Afghanistan scientists assess achievements of Australia-funded wheat research

Written by Mike Listman on October 3, 2017. Posted in News.

Scientists take readings of rust disease incidence on experimental wheat lines at the Shishambagh research station, Nangarhar, of the Agricultural Research Institute of Afghanistan. Photo: Raqib/ CIMMYT

With generous funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) over the last 15 years, Afghanistan research organizations and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) have helped supply Afghan farmers with improved varieties and farming practices to boost production of maize and wheat.

“As of 2012, the start of the most recent phase of ACIAR-funded work, Afghanistan partners have developed and released 12 high-yielding and disease resistant bread wheat varieties, as well as 3 varieties of durum wheat, 2 of barley and 3 of maize,” said Rajiv Sharma, a senior wheat scientist at CIMMYT and country liaison officer for CIMMYT in Afghanistan.

Sharma spoke at a workshop, which took place on August 28, with partners from the Agricultural Research Institute of Afghanistan (ARIA) of the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation & Livestock (MAIL). The event was organized to review accomplishments and facilitate MAIL’s takeover of all activities, when the project ends in October 2018.

“The pedigrees of all new varieties feature contributions from the breeding research of CIMMYT and the International Winter Wheat Improvement Programme based in Turkey, both responsible for introducing more than 9,000 new wheat and maize lines into the country since 2012,” Sharma added. The International Winter Wheat Improvement Programme (IWWIP) is operated by Turkey, CIMMYT, and ICARDA (the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas).

Sharma noted that CIMMYT’s presence in Afghanistan, which includes support for breeding research and training for local scientists, dates back several decades and that the latest achievements with ARIA and other partners and ACIAR support include:

The delineation of wheat agro-climatic zones.
Forecasting climate change impacts on the Afghan wheat crop.
Strategizing to raise wheat production.
Characterization of Afghanistan’s wheat genetic resource collection.
Training abroad for 64 Afghan researchers and in-country for 4,000.
Launching research on wheat hybridization.
In direct partnership with farmers, more than 1,800 farmer field demonstrations, 80 field days, and introduced machinery like seed drills and mobile seed cleaners.
Shared research on and promotion of conservation agriculture, genomic selection, wheat bio-fortification, quality protein maize, climate change, crop insurance and wheat blast resistance and control.

In good years Afghan farmers harvest upwards of 5 million tons of wheat, the country’s number-one food crop, but in some years annual wheat imports exceed 1 million tons to satisfy domestic demand, which exceeds 5.8 million tons.

Multiple partners map avenues to fortify cereal farming

The workshop attracted 45 participants representing ARIA, MAIL, ICARDA, CIMMYT, Michigan State University, ACIAR, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Embassy of Australia, and several provincial Directorates of Agriculture, Irrigation & Livestock (DAIL) of Afghanistan.

A group photo of attendees at the workshop held in Afghanistan. Photo: CIMMYT archives

Among other participants, Mahboobullah Nang, Director of Seed Certification, and Akbar Waziri, Director of the Cereal Department, both from MAIL, offered the Ministry’s support for the continuation of CIMMYT’s longstanding efforts in Afghanistan, particularly in breeding and varietal testing and promotion.

Representing ACIAR, Syed Mousawi commended capacity development activities organized by CIMMYT since the 1970s, which have raised the quality of crop research in Afghanistan and provided a vital link to the global science community over the years.

Participants also recommended extending CIMMYT outreach work, offering training in extension, introducing advanced technologies, and support for and training in varietal maintenance, conservation agriculture, experimental designs, research farm management, data analysis and data management.

Asian scientists join cross-continental training to restrain wheat blast disease

Written by Mike Listman on October 2, 2017. Posted in News.

With backing from leading international donors and scientists, nine South Asia wheat researchers recently visited the Americas for training on measures to control a deadly and mysterious South American wheat disease that appeared suddenly on their doorstep in 2016.

Trainees at the CAICO farm in Okinawa, Bolivia. Photo: CIMMYT archives

Known as “wheat blast,” the disease results from a fungus that infects the wheat spikes in the field, turning the grain to inedible chaff. First sighted in Brazil in the mid-1980s, blast has affected up to 3 million hectares in South America and held back the region’s wheat crop expansion for decades.

In 2016, a surprise outbreak in seven districts of Bangladesh blighted wheat harvests on some 15,000 hectares and announced blast’s likely spread throughout South Asia, a region where rice-wheat cropping rotations cover 13 million hectares and nearly a billion inhabitants eat wheat.

“Most commercially grown wheat in South Asia is susceptible to blast,” said Pawan Singh, head of wheat pathology at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), an organization whose breeding lines are used by public research programs and seed companies in over 100 countries. “The disease poses a grave threat to food and income security in the region and yet is new and unknown to most breeders, pathologists and agronomists there.”

As part of an urgent global response to blast and to acquaint South Asian scientists with techniques to identify and describe the pathogen and help develop resistant varieties, Singh organized a two-week workshop in July. The event drew wheat scientists from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Mexico, taking them from U.S. greenhouses and labs to fields in Bolivia, where experimental wheat lines are grown under actual blast infections to test for resistance.

The training began at the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) Foreign Disease-Weed Science Research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where participants learned about molecular marker diagnosis of the causal fungus Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype triticum (MoT). Sessions also covered greenhouse screening for blast resistance and blast research conducted at Kansas State University. Inside Level-3 Biosafety Containment greenhouses from which no spore can escape, participants observed specialized plant inoculation and disease evaluation practices.

The group then traveled to Bolivia, where researchers have been fighting wheat blast for decades and had valuable experience to share with the colleagues from South Asia.

“In Bolivia, workshop participants performed hands-on disease evaluation and selection in the field—an experience quite distinct from the precise lab and greenhouse practicums,” said Singh, describing the group’s time at the Cooperativa Agropecuaria Integral Colonias Okinawa (CAICO), Bolivia, experiment station.

Other stops in Bolivia included the stations of the Instituto Nacional de Innovación Agropecuaria y Forestal (INIAF), Asociación de Productores de Oleaginosas y Trigo (ANAPO), Centro de Investigación Agrícola Tropical (CIAT), and a blast-screening nursery in Quirusillas operated by INIAF-CIMMYT.

“Scientists in South Asia have little or no experience with blast disease, which mainly attacks the wheat spike and is completely different from the leaf diseases we normally encounter,” said Prem Lal Kashyap, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research (IIWBR) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), who took part in the training. “To score a disease like blast in the field, you need to evaluate each spike and check individual spikelets, which is painstaking and labor-intensive, but only thus can you assess the intensity of disease pressure and identify any plants that potentially carry genes for resistance.”

After the U.S.A. and Bolivia, the South Asia scientists took part in a two-week pathology module of an ongoing advanced wheat improvement course at CIMMYT’s headquarters and research stations in Mexico, covering topics such as the epidemiology and characterization of fungal pathogens and screening for resistance to common wheat diseases.

Gary Peterson, explaining wheat blast screening to trainees inside the USDA-ARS Level-3 Biosafety Containment facility. Photo: CIMMYT archives — Gary Peterson (center), explaining wheat blast screening to trainees inside the USDA-ARS Level-3 Biosafety Containment facility. Photo: CIMMYT archives

The knowledge gained will allow participants to refine screening methods in South Asia and maintain communication with the blast experts they met in the Americas, according to Carolina St. Pierre who co-ordinates the precision field-based phenotyping platforms of the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat.

“They can now also raise awareness back home concerning the threat of blast and alert farmers, who may then take preventative and remedial actions,” Singh added. “The Bangladesh Ministry of Agriculture has already formed a task force through the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) to help develop and distribute blast resistant cultivars and pursue integrated agronomic control measures.”

The latest course follows on from a hands-on training course in February 2017 at the Wheat Research Center (WRC) of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Dinajpur, in collaboration with CIMMYT, Cornell University, and Kansas State University.

Participants in the July course received training from a truly international array of instructors, including Kerry Pedley and Gary Peterson, of USDA-ARS, and Christian Cruz, of Kansas State University; Felix Marza, of Bolivia’s Instituto Nacional de Innovación Agropecuaria y Forestal (INIAF); Pawan Singh and Carolina St. Pierre, of CIMMYT; Diego Baldelomar, of ANAPO; and Edgar Guzmán, of CIAT-Bolivia.

Funding for the July event came from the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), CIMMYT, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (through the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia), the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), and the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat.

Leading nutritionist Julie Miller Jones promotes the benefits of whole grains. (Photo: CIMMYT)

Leading nutritionist cites whole grains as critical for better nutrition and health

Written by Mike Listman on September 19, 2017. Posted in News.

People who eat the most whole grain foods have a lower risk of almost all chronic diseases and are less likely to gain weight as they age, according to Julie Miller Jones, Distinguished Scholar and Professor Emerita at St. Catherine University, U.S.A.

“All kinds of epidemiological research shows that whole grain intake reduces obesity and the risk of diabetes, coronary heart and cardiovascular diseases, stroke, cancers, and death from all causes,” said Miller Jones, speaking to representatives of food processing companies and associations and scientists at the first “Maize and Wheat Quality and Nutrition Day” held near Mexico City on September 14.

Miller Jones emphasized that relatively modest amounts of grain in diets can deliver important health impacts. “We’re talking about eating around three slices of bread, or a bowl of oatmeal with a sandwich, or oatmeal in the morning, with pasta at lunch and rice at night,” she explained.

Hosted by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), a publicly-funded organization that works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to increase the productivity and quality of maize and wheat cropping systems, the event highlighted the critical connections between farmers, crop breeding and the quality of maize (corn) and wheat food products.

“It’s great that CIMMYT hosted this meeting,” said one participant, noting the complementary roles of the food industry and CIMMYT. “Companies like ours are only beginning to realize that improving our bottom line and sustainability doesn’t start with the flour we receive, but rather ten steps before that, with breeding, quality analyses, agronomy and even extension work in the field.”

In addition to packaged commercial breads, small individual loaves prepared daily in neighborhood bakeries are standard fare in Mexico. Photo: Mike Listman/ CIMMYT

The participants were impressed with Miller Jones’ presentation and the potential for partnering with CIMMYT, which conducts grain quality and nutritional analyses, development, selection and characterization of wheat and maize varieties for industrial and nutritional quality, as well as fostering the responsible sourcing of grain and linking farmers with markets.

“This is the first time we’ve brought together numerous essential actors in Mexico’s maize and wheat quality and nutrition value chains, and we expect that it will give dividends in better quality, more nutritious cereal grains and food for better diets,” said Natalia Palacios, CIMMYT maize nutrition and quality specialist.

In addition to using more than 35 million tons of maize each year as human food and animal feed, Mexico’s food processors annually handle more than 8 million tons of wheat grain.

“CIMMYT can serve as a shared platform for joint research with the food industry, outside of the competitive arena, and for messaging on healthy nutrition and diets,” suggested Carlos Guzmán, head of CIMMYT’s wheat chemistry and quality lab.

Together with the International Association for Cereal Science and Technology (ICC), Guzmán is organizing the 4th ICC Latin American Cereals Conference and the 13th International Gluten Workshop, both to be held in Mexico City from 11 to 17 March 2018.

Humans and food grain crops: Shared history and future

Miller Jones said that DNA of cooked grain has been found in the dental remains of Paleolithic humans, showing that people have been eating grain for more than 100,000 years. She also emphasized the need for balanced diets that feature all food groups in healthy amounts.

“We need to change our diets to healthy patterns that we can maintain for our entire lifetime, not something that you go on to go off,” she said, speaking recently in an online interview hosted by CIMMYT. “Just as nutrition experts have always recommended, unless you’re allergic to a particular food, a healthy diet should include products from all food groups, in the right amounts.”

Breaking Ground: Dagne Wegary at a busy intersection on the maize value chain

Written by Mike Listman on July 19, 2017. Posted in Features.

Like many scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) who grew up in smallholder farm households, Dagne Wegary draws inspiration from recollections of adversity and has found in science a way to make things better.

“I saw how my community struggled with traditional crop and livestock husbandry and, at an early age, started to wonder if there was a science or technology that might ease those hurdles,” Wegary said, referring to his childhood in a village in Wollega, a western Ethiopian province bordering South Sudan.

“I chose to study and work in agriculture,” Wegary explains. “Even though the farming system in my home village has not changed significantly, I am happy that the community is now among Ethiopia’s top maize producers and users of improved seed and other agricultural inputs.”

As a maize seed system specialist, Wegary works at the nexus between breeding science and actual delivery of improved seed to farmers. He interacts regularly with diverse experts, including CIMMYT and Ethiopia’s breeders and members of the national ministries of agriculture, the Ethiopia Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), non-governmental organizations including Sasakawa Global-2000 and World Vision, and especially public, private or community-based seed producers.

Quality seed is farmers’ principal means to improve productivity and secure food, according to Wegary, who calls it “the carrier of complementary production technologies, which in combination with improved agronomy can significantly increase crop yields.”

“I am most happy with Ethiopia’s increased maize productivity and self-sufficiency, which is due partly to the use of improved technologies to which we all contribute,” he said, noting that maize grain yields in Ethiopia had more than doubled since the 1990s, reaching 3.7 tons per hectare in 2016, a level second only to that of South Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Wegary, these improvements are the result of strong government support for maize research and development, along with the strong partnership between CIMMYT and the national program that has led to the release of high-yielding, stress tolerant and nutritionally-enriched maize varieties. He said that farmers’ have also increased their use of improved technologies and that public, private and community-based companies now market seed.

“Supplying seed used to be highly-centralized, but farmers’ main sources of seed now are cooperatives that buy from seed companies or companies that market directly to farmers” Wegary explained. “Many companies have their own stockists and dealers who directly interact with farmers.”

Before joining CIMMYT, as a scientist with the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), Wegary helped to implement a number of CIMMYT-led projects. “These allowed me to know CIMMYT very well and sparked my interest in joining the Center and working with its high-caliber and exemplary scientists.”

A plant breeder by training with a doctoral degree in breeding from the University of the Free State, South Africa, soon after joining CIMMYT Wegary began to contribute to projects to develop and disseminate seed of improved maize varieties with high levels of drought tolerance and enhanced protein quality.

He has been involved since the early 2000s in promoting quality protein maize (QPM). The grain of QPM features enhanced levels of lysine and tryptophan, amino acids that are essential for humans and certain farm animals. Wegary took part in a CIMMYT project that supported the release of five new QPM varieties.

“Many companies are now producing and marketing QPM in Ethiopia,” Wegary said. A 2009 study in the science journal Food Policy found that eating QPM instead of conventional maize resulted in 12 and 9 percent increases in growth rates for weight and height, respectively, in infants and young children with mild-to-moderate undernutrition and where maize constituted the major staple food.

Wegary believes sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest challenges include climate change-induced heat and drought, natural resource depletion, and pest and disease outbreaks, coupled with increasing populations. In combination these factors are significantly reducing food security and the availability of resources.

“I want to be a key player in the battle towards the realization of food and nutritional security, as well as the economic well-being of poor farmers, through sustainable and more productive maize farming systems.”

Farmers in Pakistan benefit from new zinc-enriched high-yielding wheat

Written by Mike Listman on June 27, 2017. Posted in News.

Hans-Joachim Braun (left, white shirt), director of the global wheat program at CIMMYT, Maqsood Qamar (center), wheat breeder at Pakistan’s National Agricultural Research Center, Islamabad, and Muhammad Imtiaz (right), CIMMYT wheat improvement specialist and Pakistan country representative, discuss seed production of Zincol. Photo: Kashif Syed/CIMMYT. — Hans-Joachim Braun (left, white shirt), director of the global wheat program at CIMMYT, Maqsood Qamar (center), wheat breeder at Pakistan’s National Agricultural Research Center, Islamabad, and Muhammad Imtiaz (right), CIMMYT wheat improvement specialist and Pakistan country representative, discussing seed production of Zincol. Photo: Kashif Syed/CIMMYT.

ISLAMABAD (CIMMYT) – Farmers in Pakistan are eagerly adopting a nutrient-enhanced wheat variety offering improved food security, higher incomes, health benefits and a delicious taste.

Known as Zincol and released to farmers in 2016, the variety provides harvests as abundant as those for other widely grown wheat varieties, but its grain contains 20 percent more zinc, a critical micronutrient missing in the diets of many poor people in South Asia.

Due to these benefits and its delicious taste, Zincol was one of the top choices among farmers testing 12 new wheat varieties in 2016.

“I would eat twice as many chappatis of Zincol as of other wheat varieties,” said Munib Khan, a farmer in Gujar Khan, Rawalpindi District, Punjab Province, Pakistan, referring to its delicious flavor.

Khan has been growing Zincol since its release. In 2017, he planted a large portion of his wheat fields with the seed, as did members of the Gujar Khan Seed Producer Group to which he belongs.

The group is one of 21 seed producer associations established to grow quality seed of new wheat varieties with assistance from the country’s National Rural Support Program (NRSP) in remote areas of Pakistan. The support program is a key partner in the Pakistan Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP), led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

“Over the 2016 and 2017 cropping seasons, 400 tons of seed of Zincol has been shared with farmers, seed companies and promotional partners,” said Imtiaz Muhammad, CIMMYT country representative in Pakistan and a wheat improvement specialist.

Zincol resulted from the CIMMYT’s “biofortification” breeding research, focused on enhancing nutrient levels in the grain of key food crops. Scientists develop biofortified crops using diverse genetic resources, including wheat landraces and wild relatives with the genetic potential to accumulate zinc in the grain.

Genes for enhanced grain zinc content from those sources are crossed into adapted, high-yielding varieties, over repeated cycles of selection involving many thousands of plants.

“One year after the release of Zincol, wheat farmers on more than 320 hectares are sowing the variety,” Imtiaz said.

He also noted that 15 tons of Zincol seed was shared free of charge for testing with 600 farm families in Sukkar District, Sindh Province, through an initiative of World Vision-Canada and HarvestPlus, a CGIAR research program dedicated to the study and delivery of biofortified foods.

Zincol harvests as high as other widely grown wheat varieties, but its grain contains 20 percent more zinc, a critical micronutrient missing in the diets of many poor people in South Asia. Photo: Kashif Syed/CIMMYT — Zincol yields as much other widely grown wheat varieties, but its grain contains 20 percent more zinc, a critical micronutrient missing in the diets of many poor people in South Asia. Photo: Kashif Syed/CIMMYT

Wheat: Vehicle for enhanced nutrition

Pakistan produces more than 25 million tons of wheat a year. The country has an annual per capita consumption averaging around 124 kilograms — among the highest in the world and providing over 60 percent of inhabitants’ daily caloric intake. The staple wheat-based foods are chappatis or a flat bread baked on the walls of large, cylindrical clay ovens.

Particularly in remote areas of Pakistan, human diets too often lack essential micronutrients such as zinc. According to a 2011 nutrition survey, 39 percent of children in Pakistan and 48 percent of pregnant women suffer from zinc deficiency, leading to child stunting rates of more than 40 percent and high infant mortality.

Zinc deficiency is also known to cause diarrheal disease, lower respiratory tract infections, malaria, hypogonadism, impaired immune function, skin disorders, cognitive dysfunction and anorexia, according to the World Health Organization.

“Given its role as a key food staple, wheat with enhanced levels of zinc and other micronutrients can contribute to better nutrition,” said Velu Govindan, a CIMMYT wheat breeder who specializes in biofortification and helped develop Zincol.

“Zincol also carries the genetic background of NARC 2011, a popular, high-yielding Pakistan wheat variety that resists wheat stem rust, a deadly disease that threatens wheat worldwide,” Govindan added.

As part of AIP and HarvestPlus, as well as with numerous public and private partners and farmer seed production groups in Pakistan, CIMMYT is leading the extensive evaluation, distribution and seed production of Zincol, said Krishna Dev Joshi, a former CIMMYT wheat improvement specialist who worked on the project.

“With modest resources and limited amounts of seed, we tested and promoted Zincol over the last two years in Balochistan, Punjab, and Sindh, covering 15 districts and engaging nearly 700 farmers,” Joshi explained.

Joshi said farmer seed producers and private seed companies were able to provide another 100 tons of seed in 2016, enough to sow more than 2,500 hectares in 2017 and over half a million hectares in 2018.

“Zincol reached farmers nine years after the initial breeding cross in 2007, several years more quickly than is the norm in Pakistan, partly because it was tested simultaneously in national and provincial trials,” Joshi added. “Zincol is part of a suite of new, micronutrient-enhanced wheat varieties bred by CIMMYT and partners for use in South Asia, a region whose inhabitants consume 100 million tons of wheat each year.”

For India, Govindan and partners created a new biofortified wheat variety using synthetic parents crossed onto WH1105, a CIMMYT-derived high-yielding variety grown in India’s Northwestern Plain Zone. The new variety out-yields other popular varieties by as much as 8 percent and has a 20 percent higher zinc content, as well as good resistance to yellow rust disease. Another new Indian variety, Zinc Shakti, has a 40 percent greater grain zinc content and is being marketed by the private sector and spread via farmer-to-farmer seed sharing.

CSIRO and CIMMYT link on wheat phenomics, physiology and data

Written by Mike Listman on June 26, 2017. Posted in Features.

Building on a more than 40-year-old partnership in crop modelling and physiology, a two-day workshop organized by CIMMYT and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) achieved critical steps towards a common framework for field phenotyping techniques, data interoperability and sharing experience.

Involving 23 scientists from both organizations and held at El Batán from 12 to 13 June 2017, the event emerged partly from a 2016 visit to CIMMYT by CSIRO Agriculture and Food executives and focused on wheat, according to Matthew Reynolds, CIMMYT wheat physiologist and distinguished scientist.

“Capitalizing on our respective strengths, we developed basic concepts for several collaborations in physiology and breeding, and will follow up within ongoing projects and through pursuit of new funding,” Reynolds said, signaling the following:

Comparison of technologies to estimate key crop traits, including GreenSeeker and hyperspectral images, IR thermometry, digital imagery and LiDAR approaches, while testing and validating prediction of phenotypic traits using UAV (drone) imagery.
Study of major differences between spike and leaf photosynthesis, and attempts to standardize gas exchange between field and controlled environments.
Work with breeders to screen advanced lines for photosynthetic traits in breeding nurseries, including proof of concept to link higher photosynthetic efficiency / performance to biomass accumulation.
Validation/testing of wheat simulation model for efficient use of radiation.
Evaluation of opportunities to provide environment characterization of phenotyping platforms, including systematic field/soil mapping to help design plot and treatment layouts, considering bioassays from aerial images as well as soil characteristics such as pH, salinity, and others.
Testing the heritability of phenotypic expression from parents to their higher-yielding progeny in both Mexico and Australia.
Extraction of new remote sensed traits (e.g., number of heads per plot) from aerial images by machine learning (ML) of scored traits by breeders and use of ML to teach those to the algorithm.
Demonstrating a semantic data framework’s use in identifying specific genotypes for strategic crossing, based on phenotypes.
Exchanging suitable data sets to test the interoperability of available data management tools, focusing on the suitability of the Phenomics Ontology Driven Data (PODD) platform for phenotypic data exchanges, integration, and retrieval.

The shared history of the two organizations in wheat physiology goes back to the hiring by Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, former CIMMYT wheat scientist and Nobel Prize laureate, of post-doctoral fellow Tony Fischer in 1970. Now an Honorary Research Fellow at CSIRO, Fischer served as director of CIMMYT’s global wheat program from 1989 to 1996 and developed important publications on wheat physiology earlier in his career, based on data from research at CIMMYT. In the early 1990s, Lloyd Evans, who established the Canberra Phytotron at CSIRO in the 1970s, served on CIMMYT’s Board of Trustees. Former CIMMYT maize post-doc Scott Chapman left for CSIRO in the mid-1990s but has partnered continuously with the Center on crop modelling and remote sensing. With funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) in the late 1990s, CSIRO scientists Richard Richards, Tony Condon, Greg Rebetzke and Graham Farquhar began shared research with Reynolds and Martin van Ginkel, a CIMMYT wheat breeder, on stomatal aperture traits. Following work at CSIRO with Lynne McIntyre and Chapman, scientist Ky Matthews led the CIMMYT Biometrics Group from 2011 to 2012, collaborating with CIMMYT wheat physiologists on a landmark project to map complex physiological traits using the purpose-designed population, Seri/Babax. Reflecting the recent focus on climate resilience traits, Fernanda Dreccer of CSIRO is helping CIMMYT to establish the Heat and Drought Wheat Improvement Consortium (HeDWIC), among other important collaborations.

Surinder K. Vasal, former CIMMYT maize scientist and World Food Prize laureate, with Natalia Palacios, head of the CIMMYT maize quality laboratory, and Martin Kropff, CIMMYT director general, helped unveil the plaque in honor of Dr. Evangelina Villegas. (Photo: A. Cortés/CIMMYT)

CIMMYT renames lab to honor Evangelina Villegas, World Food Prize laureate

Written by Mike Listman on June 7, 2017. Posted in News.

El BATAN, Mexico, (CIMMYT) – To celebrate and expand the legacy of the late Evangelina Villegas Moreno, a pioneering Mexican cereal chemist who won the 2000 World Food Prize for co-developing quality protein maize, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) has named its maize quality laboratory in her honor.

A memorial plaque was unveiled on 6 June by Martin Kropff, CIMMYT’s director general, at the entrance of the CIMMYT lab that generates crucial grain quality data for the center’s global maize breeding efforts.

“What better way to honor Dr. Villegas’ accomplishments than to have a CIMMYT maize quality lab named after her?” Kropff said. “The center is proud to have counted among its ranks a professional like Dr. Villegas, a pioneering Mexican scientist whose contributions to nutrition and food security will continue to resonate in impoverished regions.”

Breeding lines and populations from CIMMYT’s maize program are used in 100 countries and result in high-yielding, resilient varieties and hybrids grown on at least 20 million hectares throughout the tropics and subtropics.

One derivative of that work, known as quality protein maize (QPM), was developed by Villegas and Surinder K. Vasal, another former CIMMYT maize breeder and distinguished scientist, with whom she shared the 2000 World Food Prize.

Maize grain is rich in carbohydrates but poor in protein. In particular, it is lacking in the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which are key protein building blocks in human diets. QPM grain contains more of those amino acids and so offers better nutrition for people with heavily maize-based diets, as is the case in parts of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

A 2009 study in the science journal Food Policy found that eating QPM instead of conventional maize resulted in respective 12 and 9 percent increases in growth rates for weight and height, in infants and young children with mild-to-moderate undernutrition and where maize constituted the major staple food.

“Today, almost 30 years after Villegas retired from CIMMYT, the chemical and analytical approaches she developed still underpin work to monitor protein quality in QPM,” said Natalia Palacios, CIMMYT maize nutrition quality specialist and current head of the renamed lab. Together with Kropff, Vasal and Villegas’ sister, Juana Villegas Moreno, Palacios helped unveil the new plaque in a ceremony attended by 100 current and former CIMMYT personnel and Villegas’ family members.

Groundbreaker in science and society

Known as “Eva” to colleagues, Villegas, who passed away in April 2017, was born in Mexico City in 1924 and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and biology at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute, at a time when higher education for women was still a novelty.

In 1950, she began her career as a chemist and researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Nutrition and at the Office of Special Studies, an initiative funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government that was CIMMYT’s precursor.

She returned to CIMMYT in 1967, after earning a Master of Science degree in cereal technology from Kansas State University and a doctoral degree in cereal chemistry and breeding from North Dakota State University.

Villegas worked with Vasal in CIMMYT’s QPM breeding program, which operated from 1970 to 1985. Requiring the capacity to select for intricate gene combinations before the advent of DNA markers or genetic engineering, the program could not have succeeded without the support of Villegas’ lab and science, according to Vasal.

“I would call it exemplary interdisciplinary work (for) a breeder and a biochemist,” said Vasal. “Her lab analyzed 26,000 grain samples or more a year and provided the data in time for us to sow or pollinate experimental lines. Eva also furnished valuable critical suggestions that improved our breeding work.”

In a message read at the unveiling, Sanjaya Rajaram, 2014 World Food Prize recipient and former CIMMYT wheat scientist and program director, recalled Villegas’s significant contributions to the center’s wheat breeding research, which included establishing the center’s wheat industrial quality lab.

An inspiration in science to improve nutrition

Villegas’ prizes and professional recognitions include the 2000 Woman of the Year award of the Mexican Women’s Association, presented to her by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo. In 2001 Villegas was named to Alpha Delta Kappa’s prestigious list of International Women of Distinction and received the Lazaro Cardenas Medal from the National Polytechnic Institute. In 2013 Kansas State University (KSU) honored Villegas with an Outstanding Alumni Award.

“As a scientist, as a woman and as a Mexican, Villegas will continue to inspire future generations working to enhance food security and nutrition for the disadvantaged,” said Palacios.

Closing the circle: Kanwarpal Dhugga works at CIMMYT

Written by Mike Listman on March 29, 2017. Posted in Features.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Growing up on a small farm in India’s northwest Punjab state, Kanwarpal Dhugga was a young boy when the first Green Revolution wheat varieties arrived in his village. Now stationed in Mexico as Principal Scientist and head of biotechnology for agricultural development at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Dhugga has witnessed vast changes in his boyhood community.

“It was tight for families there, living from season to season with no extra money to spend,” Dhugga said, reflecting on the period during the 1960s before new high-yielding, disease resistant wheat varieties began to reshape agricultural potential throughout Asia. “Farmers used to plant a mixture of wheat and chickpeas. If rains were good, you got good wheat yield; if there was a drought, you got at least chickpeas.”

The use by farmers of the new, high-yielding wheat varieties developed by the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, who was head of the wheat program at CIMMYT headquarters in Mexico, coincided with the introduction of electric power to Dhugga’s area. Electricity enabled pumping underground water for irrigation, making farming more predictable. Within a couple of years, everyone was growing new, more resilient semi-dwarf wheat varieties and yields had increased substantially.

The community was poor and without many educational resources. Dhugga recalls sitting on the ground at elementary school in India and carrying his books in a satchel along with a burlap gunnysack, which he used as a mat to sit on. Despite challenges, his perseverance and determination eventually took him to Punjab Agricultural University, where he earned a master’s degree in plant breeding, then to the University of California, Riverside for a doctoral degree in botany and plant genetics, and finally for a post-graduate degree at Stanford University, where he worked directly with Peter Ray, renowned biologist and now a Stanford emeritus professor.

“I started in genetics and finished in biochemistry,” Dhugga explained. “Science grew on me and I became so fixated that I couldn’t live without it, and that after I had no clue growing up what I wanted to become in life. The vision extended only as far as the next year.”

From 1996 through 2014, he worked at DuPont-Pioneer, the multinational seed producer, where his work included leading research on expressing high-value industrial polymers in maize grains and soybean seeds, developing in-field screening tools to screen maize hybrids for stalk strength, improving nitrogen use efficiency in maize, and on developing a combined genetic marker x metabolites model for predicting maize grain yield, demonstrating that the combined model was more effective than genetic markers alone.

“I was a developer and supplier of advanced plant genetics for a company that was providing high-quality maize seed to farmers around the world, but I felt like something was missing – a social component,” Dhugga said.

Taking a job at CIMMYT, where the focus is on helping improve food security for poor smallholder farmers in the developing world, satisfied this urge, according to Dhugga. “It felt like completing a circle, given where I came from and the role of CIMMYT in improving farmers’ food security and incomes.”

At CIMMYT, he is leading work to apply a recent technology for what is commonly called “gene editing.” Known as the CRISPR-Cas9 system, it allows researchers to enhance or turn off the expression of “native” genes as well as modify the properties of the translated proteins in crops like maize or wheat more simply and effectively than with other methods, including transgenics.

“To deactivate a gene and thus learn about what it does used to be a major undertaking that took years, and even then you didn’t find some of the things you wanted to,” Dhugga explained. “With the new technology, you can find what you’re looking for in much less time. That’s the main focus of my work right now.”

CIMMYT is collaborating with DuPont-Pioneer to fine map, isolate and validate a major gene in maize for resistance to maize lethal necrosis, which appeared in sub-Saharan Africa in 2011 and has caused major losses to maize crops, decreasing food security and the ability of the smallholder farmers to provide for their families.

“We already know a locus that confers high levels of resistance against the combination of viruses that cause the disease,” he said. “Once we have the specific gene, we can edit it directly in elite maize lines used for hybrid production in Africa, eliminating the need for generations of expensive crosses to get uniform lines with that gene.”

Dhugga greatly respects living systems and, rather than viewing his work as inventing new methods, believes he is drawing out the best potential of nature.

“The biology for these processes is already there in nature; we just need to rediscover and apply it to benefit farmers and ensure food security,” he said.

A ton of seed shipped to the doomsday vault at Svalbard

Written by Mike Listman on February 8, 2017. Posted in News.

CIMMYT gene bank specialists — shown here with the shipment destined for Svalbard — conserve, study and share a remarkable living catalog of genetic diversity comprising over 28,000 unique seed collections of maize and over 140,000 of wheat (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT).

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Staff of the gene bank of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) have sent 56 boxes of nearly 28,000 samples of maize and wheat seed from the center’s collections, to be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Located on Spitsbergen Island in Norway’s remote Arctic Svalbard Archipelago, 1,300 kilometers south of the North Pole, the vault provides free, “safe deposit” cold storage for back-up samples of seed of humanity’s crucial food crops.

“CIMMYT has already sent 130,291 duplicate samples of our maize and wheat seed collections to Svalbard,” said Bibiana Espinosa, research associate in wheat genetic resources. “This brings the total to nearly 158,218 seed samples, which we store at Svalbard to guard against the catastrophic loss of maize and wheat seed and diversity, in case of disasters and conflicts.”

Thursday’s shipment contained 1,964 samples of maize seed and 25,963 samples of wheat and weighed nearly a ton, according to Espinosa.

The wheat seed came from 62 countries and nearly half the samples comprised “landraces” — locally-adapted varieties created through thousands of years of selection by farmers.

“Of the maize samples, 133 contained seed of improved varieties, 51 were of teosinte — maize’s direct ancestor — and 1,780 were of landraces,” said Marcial Rivas, research assistant for maize genetic resources. “Many landraces are in danger of permanent loss, as farmers who grew them have left the countryside to seek work and changing climates have altered the landraces’ native habitats.”

The government of Norway and the Crop Trust cover the cost of storage and upkeep of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, coordinating shipments in conjunction with the Nordic Genetic Resource Center. Established in 2006, the Crop Trust supports the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide and helps to fund CIMMYT’s work to collect and conserve maize and wheat genetic resources. CIMMYT’s maize and wheat germplasm bank is supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Genebanks.

Agricultural researchers forge new ties to develop nutritious crops and environmental farming

Written by Mike Listman on January 25, 2017. Posted in News.

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT)—Scientists from two of the world’s leading agricultural research institutes will embark on joint research to boost global food security, mitigate environmental damage from farming, and help to reduce food grain imports by developing countries.

At a recent meeting, 30 scientists from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and Rothamsted Research, a UK-based independent science institute, agreed to pool expertise in research to develop higher-yielding, more disease resistant and nutritious wheat varieties for use in more productive, climate-resilient farming systems.

“There is no doubt that our partnership can help make agriculture in the UK greener and more competitive, while improving food security and reducing import dependency for basic grains in emerging and developing nations,” said Achim Dobermann, director of Rothamsted Research, which was founded in 1843 and is the world’s longest running agricultural research station.

Individual Rothamsted and CIMMYT scientists have often worked together over the years, but are now forging a stronger, broader collaboration, according to Martin Kropff, CIMMYT director general. “We’ll combine the expertise of Rothamsted in such areas as advanced genetics and complex cropping systems with the applied reach of CIMMYT and its partners in developing countries,” said Kropff.

Nearly half of the world’s wheat lands are sown to varieties that carry contributions from CIMMYT’s breeding research and yearly economic benefits from the additional grain produced are as high as $3.1 billion.

Experts predict that by 2050 staple grain farmers will need to grow at least 60 percent more than they do now, to feed a world population exceeding 9 billion while addressing environmental degradation and climate shocks.

Rothamsted and CIMMYT will now develop focused proposals for work that can be funded by the UK and other donors, according to Hans Braun, director of CIMMYT’s global wheat program. “We’ll seek large initiatives that bring significant impact,” said Braun.

Breaking Ground: Scientist Deepmala Sehgal on the trail of novel wheat diversity

Written by Mike Listman on January 18, 2017. Posted in Features.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

Deepmala Sehgal, wheat geneticist and molecular breeder at CIMMYT. Photo: M. Listman/CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Molecular analysis research by Deepmala Sehgal, a wheat geneticist and molecular breeder who joined the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) as an associate scientist in 2013, has led to the discovery of novel genes for yield, disease resistance and climate resilience in previously little-used wheat genetic resources.

But getting to the point of applying cutting-edge DNA marker technology to support CIMMYT wheat breeding has involved a few dramatic moves for the New Delhi native, who studied botany throughout middle school and university. “I loved science and chose plant science, because I enjoyed the field trips and didn’t like dissecting animals,” Sehgal said, explaining her choice of profession.

It wasn’t until she was studying for her Ph.D. at Delhi University in 2008 that she first used molecular markers, which are DNA segments near genes for traits of interest, like drought tolerance, and which can help breeders to develop improved crop varieties that feature those traits.

“For my thesis, I used molecular markers in a very basic way to analyze the diversity of safflower species that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had in its gene bank but didn’t know how to classify. I found a place for some and, for several, had to establish completely new subspecies,” Sehgal said.

Later, as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Aberystwyth in Britain, Sehgal used an approach known as fine mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL), for drought tolerance in pearl millet. “The aim of fine mapping is to get shorter QTL markers that are nearer to the actual gene involved,” she explained, adding that this makes it easier to use the markers for breeding.

As it turned out, Sehgal’s growing proficiency in molecular marker research for crops made her suited to work as a wheat geneticist at CIMMYT.

“By 2013, CIMMYT had generated a huge volume of new data through genotyping-by-sequencing research, but those data needed to be analyzed using an approach called “association mapping,” to identify markers that breeders could use to select for specific traits. My experience handling such data and working with drought stress gave me an in with CIMMYT.”

Based at CIMMYT’s Mexico headquarters, Sehgal currently devotes 70 percent of her time to work for the CIMMYT global wheat program and the remainder for Seeds of Discovery, a CIMMYT-led project supported by Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA), which aims to unlock new wheat genetic diversity able to address climate change challenges.

Over the last two years, she has served as lead author for two published studies and co-author for four others. One used genotyping-by-sequencing loci and gene-based markers to examine the diversity of more than 1,400 spring bread wheat seed collections from key wheat environments. Another applied genome-wide association analysis on a selection of landrace collections from Turkey.

“In the first, we discovered not only thousands of new DNA marker variations in landraces adapted to drought and heat, but a new allele for the vernalization gene, which influences the timing of wheat flowering, and new alleles for genes controlling grain quality, all in landraces from near wheat’s center of origin in Asia and the Middle East.”

Sehgal acknowledges the as-yet limited impact of molecular markers in wheat breeding. “Individual markers generally have small effects on genetically complex traits like yield or drought tolerance; moreover, many studies fail to account for “epistasis,” the mutual influence genes have on one another, within a genome.”

To address this, she and colleagues have carried out the first study to identify genomic regions with stable expression for grain yield and yield stability, as well as accounting for their individual epistatic interactions, in a large sample of elite wheat lines under multiple environments via genome wide association mapping. A paper on this work has been accepted for publication in Nature Scientific Reports.

Sehgal has found her experience at CIMMYT enriching. “I feel free here to pursue the work I truly enjoy and that can make a difference, helping our center’s wheat breeders to create improved varieties with which farmers can feed a larger, more prosperous global population in the face of climate change and new, deadly crop diseases.”

Harnessing medical technology and global partnerships to drive gains in food crop productivity

Written by Mike Listman on December 22, 2016. Posted in Features.

Ulrich Schurr (left), of Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich research center and chair of the International Plant Phenotyping Network (IPPN), and Matthew Reynolds, wheat physiologist of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), are promoting global partnerships in phenotyping to improve critical food crops, through events like the recent International Crop Phenotyping Symposium. Photo: M.Listman/CIMMYT — Ulrich Schurr (L), of Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich research center and chair of the International Plant Phenotyping Network, and Matthew Reynolds, wheat physiologist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, are promoting global partnerships in phenotyping to improve critical food crops, through events like the recent International Crop Phenotyping Symposium. Photo: CIMMYT/Mike Listman

EL BATÁN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Global research networks must overcome nationalist and protectionist tendencies to provide technology advances the world urgently needs, said a leading German scientist at a recent gathering in Mexico of 200 agricultural experts from more than 20 countries.

“Agriculture’s critical challenges of providing food security and better nutrition in the face of climate change can only be met through global communities that share knowledge and outputs; looking inward will not lead to results,” said Ulrich Schurr, director of the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences of the Forschungszentrum Jülich research center, speaking at the 4th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium

One such community is the International Plant Phenotyping Network (IPPN), chaired by Schurr and co-host of the symposium in December, with the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT.

Adapting medical sensors helps crop breeders see plants as never before

“Phenotyping” is the high-throughput application of new technology — including satellite images, airborne cameras, and multi-spectral sensors mounted on robotic carts — to the age-old art of measuring the traits and performance of breeding lines of maize, wheat and other crops, Schurr said.

“Farmers domesticated major food crops over millennia by selecting and using seed of individual plants that possessed desirable traits, like larger and better quality grain,” he explained. “Science has helped modern crop breeders to ‘fast forward’ the process, but breeders still spend endless hours in the field visually inspecting experimental plants. Phenotyping technologies can expand their powers of observation and the number of lines they process each year.”

Adapting scanning devices and protocols pioneered for human medicine or engineering, phenotyping was initially confined to labs and other controlled settings, according to Schurr.

“The push for the field started about five years ago, with the availability of new high-throughput, non-invasive devices and the demand for field data to elucidate the genetics of complex traits like yield or drought and heat tolerance,” he added.

Less than 10 years ago, Schurr could count on the fingers of one hand the number of institutions working on phenotyping. “Now, IPPN has 25 formal members and works globally with 50 institutions and initiatives.”

Cameras and other sensors mounted on flying devices like this blimp [remote-control quadcopter] provide crop researchers with important visual and numerical information about crop growth, plant architecture and photosynthetic traits, among other characteristics. Photo: Emma Quilligan/CIMMYT — Cameras and other sensors mounted on flying devices like this blimp provide crop researchers with important visual and numerical information about crop growth, plant architecture and photosynthetic traits, among other characteristics. Photo: E. Quilligan/CIMMYT

Many ways to see plants and how they grow

So-called “deep” phenotyping uses technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission and computer tomography to identify, measure and understand “invisible” plant parts, systems and processes, including roots and water capture and apportionment.

In controlled environments such as labs and greenhouses, researchers use automated systems and environmental simulation to select sources of valuable traits and to gain insight on underlying plant physiology that is typically masked by the variation found in fields, according to Schurr.

“Several specialists in our symposium described automated lab setups to view and analyze roots and greenhouse systems to assess crop shoot geometry, biomass accumulation and photosynthesis,” he explained. “These are then linked to crop simulation models and DNA markers for genes of important traits.”

Schurr said that support for breeding and precision agriculture includes the use of cameras or other sensors that take readings from above plant stands and crop rows in the field.

“These may take the form of handheld devices or be mounted on autonomous, robotic carts,” he said, adding that the plants can be observed using normal light and infrared or other types of radiation reflected from the plant and soil.

“The sensors can also be mounted on flying devices including drones, blimps, helicopters or airplanes. This allows rapid coverage of a larger area and many more plants than are possible through visual observation alone by breeders walking through a field.”

In the near future, mini-satellites equipped with high-resolution visible light sensors to capture and share aerial images of breeding plots will be deployed to gather data in the field, according to symposium participants.

Bringing high-flying technologies to earth

As is typical with new technologies and approaches to research, phenotyping for crop breeding and research holds great promise but must overcome several challenges, including converting images to numeric information, managing massive and diverse data, interfacing effectively with genomic analysis and bringing skeptical breeders on board.

“The demands of crop breeding are diverse — identifying novel traits, studies of genetic resources and getting useful diversity into usable lines, choosing the best parents for crosses and selecting outstanding varieties in the field, to name a few,” Schurr explained. “From the breeders’ side, there’s an opportunity to help develop novel methods and statistics needed to harness the potential of phenotyping technology.”

A crucial linkage being pursued is that with genomic analyses. “Studies often identify genome regions tied to important traits like photosynthesis as ‘absolute,’ without taking into account that different genes might come into play depending on, say, the time of day of measurement,” Schurr said. “Phenotyping can shed light on such genetic phenomena, describing the same thing from varied angles.”

Speaking at the symposium, Greg Rebetzke, a research geneticist since 1995 at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said that the effective delivery in commercial breeding of “phenomics” — a term used by some to describe the high-throughput application of phenotyping in the field — is more a question of what and when, not how.

“It’s of particular interest in breeding for genetically complex traits like drought tolerance,” Rebetzke said. “Phenomics can allow breeders to screen many more plants in early generations of selection, helping to bring in more potentially useful genetic diversity. This genetic enrichment with key alleles early on can significantly increase the likelihood of identifying superior lines in the later, more expensive stages of selecting, which is typically done across many different environments.”

Moreover, where conventional breeding generally uses “snaphot” observations of plants at different growth stages, phenotyping technology can provide detailed time-series data for selected physiological traits and how they are responding to their surroundings—say, well-watered versus dry conditions—and for a much greater diversity and area of plots and fields.

Phenotyping is already being translated from academic research to commercial sector development and use, according to Christoph Bauer, leader of phenotyping technologies at KWS, a German company that breeds for and markets seed of assorted food crops.

“It takes six-to-eight years of pre-breeding and breeding to get our products to market,” Bauer said in his symposium presentation. “In that process, phenotyping can be critical to sort the ‘stars’ from the ‘superstars’.”

Commercial technology providers for phenotyping are also emerging, according to Schurr, helping to ensure robustness, the use of best practices and alignment with the needs of academic and agricultural industry customers.

“The partnership triad of academia, commercial providers and private seed companies offers a powerful avenue for things like joint analysis of genotypic variation in the pre-competitive domain or testing of cutting-edge technology,” he added.

On the final morning of the symposium, participants broke off into groups to discuss special topics, including the cost effectiveness of high-throughput phenotyping and its use to analyze crop genetic resources, measuring roots, diagnostics of reproductive growth, sensor technology needs, integrating phenotypic data into crop models, and public-private collaboration.

Schurr said organizations like CIMMYT play a crucial role.

“CIMMYT does relevant breeding for millions of maize and wheat farmers — many of them smallholders — who live in areas often of little interest for large-scale companies, providing support to the national research programs and local or regional seed producers that serve such farmers,” Schurr said. “The center also operates phenotyping platforms worldwide for traits like heat tolerance and disease resistance and freely spreads knowledge and technology.”