Tag: Breaking Ground

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

MEXICO CITY (CIMMYT) – As a child helping out on his family’s farm in rural India, Vijay Chaikam dreamed of helping farmers increase the hard won returns of their agricultural labor to improve their livelihoods. Today, he works as a scientist and manager at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) doubled haploid (DH) facility in Kiboko, Kenya.

He produces DH maize lines, which are highly uniform, genetically pure and stable, making the maize breeding process more intuitive and efficient by simplifying logistics. The outcome of this work is that breeders can develop improved maize varieties faster than ever before so that they can be delivered to the smallholder farmers that need them the most.

“I grew up in a rural village in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, where my family depended on agriculture for their livelihood,” Chaikam said. “During my childhood, I used to work in the fields, planting, weeding and harvesting alongside my family members to save labor costs. I realized that despite their backbreaking work, most farming families suffer economically. This inspired me to pursue a career in agriculture that would allow me to contribute to reduce the efforts of the farmers and increase their farm income.”

After receiving his doctorate in genetics at West Virginia University in the United States, Chaikam worked at Purdue University and then moved to CIMMYT headquarters in Mexico in 2011 as an associate scientist. His work involved conducting research on developing and implementing maize DH production technology for tropical breeding programs.

In 2016, he moved to CIMMYT’s office in Kenya to manage the Maize DH Facility at KALRO-Kiboko Center, where he assists maize scientists from CIMMYT and partner organizations in the development of DH lines. The efficiency of the DH procedure in maize cuts the time it takes to develop parental lines from six to eight seasons to just two or three seasons.

“My work allows farmers to receive improved maize varieties much quicker,” Chaikam said. “Time is of the essence for farmers planting improved maize varieties in regions affected by stresses such as drought or maize lethal necrosis (MLN). DH technology can drastically cut short the time it takes to derive parental lines in a hybrid maize breeding program.”

CIMMYT’s work on DH has greatly expanded in the past few years. Between 2012 and 2016, CIMMYT scientists produced over 100,000 DH lines, up from less than 5,000 in 2011. However, adoption of the technology is lagging behind in tropical maize breeding programs due to the lack of adapted haploid inducers with high haploid induction rates. The haploid inducers enable generations of haploids – maize varieties containing only one set of chromosomes instead of the usual two sets of chromosomes found in normal diploid maize – at a high frequency. These haploids are then detected using a color marker on the kernel, and the chromosome complement is doubled artificially using treatment with a chromosome doubling agent to derive doubled haploid plants, and consequently seed from those plants.

Chaikam’s current research is aimed at improving the adoption of DH technology in tropical maize breeding programs by developing improved haploid inducers for tropical maize breeding programs, developing novel methods of haploid identification and efficient protocols for chromosomal doubling, and optimizing the agronomic management for deriving doubled haploids. He works closely with breeders to develop ways of using DH lines more efficiently in maize breeding programs. This research could be valuable in the development and deployment of improved maize varieties that benefit smallholder farmers in the developing world. In addition to his work in the DH facility, Chaikam has published several journal articles and book chapters. He has also coordinated scientific training courses.

“I always wanted my work to be relevant to the needs of farmers,” he said, explaining the factors that drew him to work at CIMMYT. “CIMMYT offered such an incredible opportunity, where my day-to-day activities have a direct impact on the development and deployment of improved maize varieties needed by farming communities. I also enjoy working with, talking to and listening to my passionate colleagues who love the work they do to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.”

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – David Guerena is fascinated by what he learns from smallholder farmers about the interactions between agriculture and the environment.

He recently joined the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), where, as soil scientist-systems agronomist, he leads the soils/nutrient management activities for the Nepal Seed and Fertilizer Project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Feed the Future Program.

Guerena’s work involves the strategic planning and execution of multidisciplinary spatial agronomy programs across complex ecologies. In addition to strict biophysical work, which involves integrating chemistry, biology, and physics into agricultural systems, he also engages in socio-economic and market facilitation dynamics research.

“Humanity has been eking out a cultivated living from the earth for around 10,000 years,” Guerena said. “Smallholder farmers are the direct link to this collective knowledge, which has shaped and defined human history. I really enjoy witnessing farmers reap satisfying harvests from their own efforts, but via outputs from agronomic systems research of which I have been a part.”

“Agriculture is intensely satisfying. A seed, fertile soil, water and sunshine eventually turn into food. This is such a simple process, yet millions of people around the world don’t get enough to eat. I draw inspiration from being a part of positively changing this dynamic.”

Originally from Santa Barbara, California, Guerena has always been fascinated by the natural sciences and international travel. He decided to pursue a career in international agriculture by obtaining his Ph.D. from Cornell University, specializing in crop and soil science. Prior to joining CIMMYT, he worked as a soil scientist and agriculture innovations manager at One Acre Fund, served as an international research fellow with the World Agroforestry Center and a Borlaug Fellow in international food security.

CIMMYT provided a unique opportunity for Guerena to work on global food systems. “Together, maize and wheat make up a significant proportion of the global food supply – maize and wheat research is a globally important mandate,” he said. “CIMMYT has also left an indelible mark on human history through facilitating the Green Revolution.”

Currently, Guerena is working on spatial agronomy programs, focusing on questions such as how to move from blanketed to site-specific agronomic recommendations across complex agro-ecologies in the developing world. Guerena will also investigate how digital technologies like SMS, smartphones, image recognition, and remote sensing data can be used and integrated into agronomy programming for smallholder farmers living in poverty.

Precision agronomy, a farming management concept based on observing, measuring, and responding to inter- and intra-field variability in crops, is already transforming agricultural efficiency in the developed world, but these advancements have not yet reached the developing world.

This is of the utmost importance, as worldwide, the vast majority of farmers are smallholders producing most of the global food supply. CIMMYT is not only looking at ways to put its top-level science into the hands of farmers, but also at ways to use these technologies to turn farmers themselves into world-class agronomists. This approach may be a way to bypass cumbersome agricultural knowledge generation and dissemination systems and reach farmers directly, at scale.

The project receives support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

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.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Akhter Ali always knew he wanted to have an impact on the livelihoods of farmers in Pakistan.

“I come from a farmer family – the poverty and inequality of rural communities always disturbed me,” said Ali, who was born in Multan district, Pakistan. “I knew from a young age I wanted to do something to help my community and the rural poor throughout my country.”

Ali, an agricultural economist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), is working to sustainably increase agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers through the Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP), an initiative funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to build up the country’s agriculture sector through the development and dissemination of new agriculture technologies.

“Agriculture supports nearly half of Pakistan’s population – more than two thirds for those living in rural areas –  and accounts for over 20 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product” Ali said. “Strengthening this sector by connecting and addressing the needs of different actors in rural markets is key to poverty reduction and achieving food security.”

Despite the significant role of agriculture to the economy, the sector has only grown 2.8 percent in recent years due to weak market structures, resource depletion and other challenges. Ali, along with other researchers, is analyzing how maize and wheat farmers can access the best seed, technology and practices to sustainably increase crop yields across the country.

“If we want to boost farmer livelihoods, we need to change how farmers work by ensuring they know how to sustainably manage their land, water and other resources,” Ali said. “We then need to ensure that the markets in which these farmers operate are stable so that they have easier access to agricultural inputs like seed.”

Ali’s research over the past four years at CIMMYT has focused on making these goals a reality, from conducting comprehensive surveys, which are expected to help develop the durum wheat market in Pakistan, to adoption and impact studies of such sustainable technology as zero tillage machines and precision land levelers, now used by thousands of farmers throughout Pakistan.

“There are 80,000 farmers – 20 percent of which are women, whose numbers are growing – working with AIP who have adopted these new, sustainable technologies,” said Ali. In the future, Ali hopes to see his work continue to be used as a tool by policy makers, extension workers and others.

“We still face challenges with farmer access to seed, from engaging women to market constraints, so it’s critical we create policies that facilitate sustainable development in rural communities,” Ali said.

Shifting trends in Pakistan from urbanization to climate change will make it even more necessary to understand how rural communities operate in the coming years, he said, adding that policies supporting its development will be key to feeding the country and alleviating rural poverty.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN (CIMMYT) — Xuecai Zhang wants to merge traditional maize breeding methods with new software and other tools to help improve farmers’ yields faster than ever.

“In the next three decades we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent to meet projected food demand,” said Zhang, a maize genomic selection breeder at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). “However, crop yields, while improving, are not increasing quickly enough to meet this challenge. We must explore new methods and technologies that can speed up our crop breeding processes if we hope to feed a world with over 2.3 billion more people by 2050.”

Growing up in Henan province, China, Zhang’s mother was a teacher who instilled a love of science in him from a young age.

“I loved exploring outside and seeing how plants grew — I always wanted to know how they worked,” said Zhang. “Maize was naturally interesting to me because it’s the second most grown crop in Henan, and is becoming a very important crop in China overall.”

Zhang first arrived at CIMMYT in 2009 while completing a doctorate in applied quantitative genetics. He subsequently returned as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011 to undertake molecular breeding and coordinate CIMMYT’s maize genomic selection program.

Since his return, he has focused mainly on helping breeders and statisticians work together to create new tools that can help accelerate the breeding process through genomic selection.

“It’s crucial that as breeders, we’re able to use genomic selection in our work,” Zhang said. “Not only does it speed up the breeding process to deliver better, faster results to farmers in the field, applied well it’s also a more cost-effective option.”

Conventional plant breeding is dependent on a researcher going into the field, observing the characteristics of a plant based on how its genotype interacts with the environment, then painstakingly selecting and combining those materials that show such favorable traits such as high yield or drought resistance.  This process is repeated again and again to develop new varieties.

Genomic selection adds DNA markers to the breeder’s toolkit. After initial field evaluation breeders are able to use DNA markers and advanced computing applications to select the best plants and predict the best combinations of plants without having to wait to evaluate every generation in the field. This speeds up the development of new varieties as more cycles of selection and recombination can be conducted in a year compared with field selection alone.

The cost of hiring a human to go and collect phenotypic data for conventional breeding is increasing, while conversely the costs associated with genomic selection are getting lower as genotyping and computing technology becomes more affordable, according to Zhang.

“Breeders need to think about where the technology is pushing our field,” he said. “They will increasingly have to be versed statisticians and computer scientists to effectively apply genomic selection to their work, and I want to help ensure they have the skills and tools to make the most of the technology.”

Zhang has helped demonstrate to breeders in Latin America, Africa and Asia of the value of genomic selection by showing that the technique can improve the prediction accuracy of successful varieties in comparison to conventional breeding. He also credits joint efforts like the GOBII project, a large-scale public-sector effort supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to apply genomic selection techniques to crop breeding programs across the developing world, as key towards curating the necessary data for genomic breeding programs.

“In the future, I hope to continue to help build better tools for breeders to move towards genomic selection,” Zhang said. “I chose to breed maize because of the potential impact it has to help smallholder farmers globally. Compared with other crops the yield potential of maize is very high, so I want to ensure we are using the best resources available that will help maize reach its full potential.”

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — At the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) it all starts with a seed. Each year, the non-profit receives requests and sends more than 700,000 packets of seed to researchers, agricultural organizations and farmers around the world from its headquarters near Mexico City. These seeds stand up to climate change, produce higher yields with fewer resources and provide the nutrition a growing global population needs.

However, before each seed travels across an international border, it is essential to ensure that each one has a clean bill of health, free from virus, fungus and bacteria pathogens. Infected seeds must be controlled or there is a risk that plant pathogens will spread, affecting crop health and potentially threatening food security.

That is where plant pathology expert Monica Mezzalama, head of CIMMYT’s Seed Health Laboratory, gets involved.

“Seed movement around the world is regulated to limit the spread of pathogens across international borders,” said the senior scientist. “I coordinate and supervise seed health testing to ensure all seeds that pass through CIMMYT meet these international standards and do not pose a risk.”

Securing the health of seeds ensures that researchers, breeders and partner organizations don’t encounter infected seed and is essential to maintaining efficient agricultural research that has impact, she added.

Since taking the helm of the Seed Health Laboratory 15 years ago, all seed that has been inspected on its way out of CIMMYT must meet certification. If unhealthy seed is found it must be quarantined and destroyed under the law, explained Mezzalama.

Seeds arriving from partner organizations, researchers or farmers are also tested for disease and granted a “seed release” by Mezzalama and her team. Authorized seed then moves on to CIMMYT researchers to be studied for disease resistance, heat tolerance and micronutrient content and added into international breeding programs. Others are placed in the maize and wheat germplasm bank, where over 175,000 different varieties are preserved on behalf of humanity and are freely available to all upon request.

A curiosity for disease and a passion to cure led Mezzalama to a career as a plant pathologist. While studying for an undergraduate degree in agronomy in her hometown of Turin, Italy, she visited nearby vineyards to study plant pathogens for the first time.

“It was working in the vineyards where I first saw plant pathogens at work and where I saw the impact they have on farmers, and what it means for their livelihoods,” she said.

After graduating in 1986, Mezzalama began her first job at CIMMYT working alongside virologist Peter Burnett on a project dedicated to barley yellow dwarf (BYD) virus, which effects barley, wheat, maize, rice and other grasses worldwide. The experience opened her mind to a new world where she learned the inner workings of plant pathogens and started to study for a doctoral degree in plant pathology in Italy.

Since returning to CIMMYT in 2001, Mezzalama has led the Seed Health Laboratory, set institutional biosafety protocols to protect against harmful incidents, which include regular reviews of the biosafety in laboratory settings, as well as well as guidelines to follow, and participated in several research projects. Most recently, she joined a project to control the spread of Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN), a devastating virus that poses a severe risk to food security in eastern Africa.

The complex disease results from the infection of two deadly viruses, maize chlorotic mottle virus and sugar cane mosaic virus. It spreads through infected maize seed and insect pests. Mezzalama’s skill in plant pathology detection was called upon to organize the opening of seed health laboratories in Kenya and Zimbabwe and also train staff on how to detect seed infected with MLN or the two associated viruses.

Currently, Mezzalama is in the final stages of developing a standard of detection protocol, providing the agriculture industry with knowledge of best practices and affordable tools to detect MLN infected maize seed.

“There are several products and methods that may be used for MLN detection in seed, these must be tested to see which obtain the most accurate results efficiently while taking into price into account,” she said.

Accuracy, time and cost are important factors when developing MLN detection protocols as common practice, implemented by partners in Kenya and other impacted countries, she explained.

Key donors to CIMMYT’s efforts in controlling MLN include the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA), the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), and the Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB), CGIAR Fund Donors and other generous contributors to CIMMYT maize research.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Support for research into breeding crops resistant to wheat rust is essential to manage the spread of the deadly disease, which has caused billions of dollars of yield losses globally in recent years, said Caixia Lan, a wheat rust expert at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

Rust disease has historically been a menace to wheat production worldwide. Although agricultural scientists manage the disease by breeding wheat varieties with rust resistant traits, the emergence of new races hinders progress and demands continued research, said the scientist.

With outbreaks of new strands reported in Europe, Africa and Central Asia, wheat rust presents an intensifying threat to the over 1 billion people in the developing world who rely on the crop as a source of food and for their livelihoods.

One of the most recent rust races, Ug99, was detected in 1998 and has since spread across 13 countries, alone causing crop losses of $3 billion in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, said Lan.

Working with CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program Lan is identifying and mapping adult-plant resistance genes to different races of rust (leaf, stripe, and stem) in bread and durum wheat and transferring them into new varieties that help secure farmer’s production.

Growing up in an area dependent on agriculture in rural China, Lan knows all too well the impact crop disease and natural disaster has on family food security and livelihoods. The struggles of smallholder farmers to feed and support their families motivated her to pursue a career in agriculture for development, but it was not until university that she became inspired by the improvements made to crop yield through genetic manipulation and breeding, she said.

After completing her doctoral degree at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and working as a wheat molecular breeding lecturer at Huazhong Agricultural University, Lan was named the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Women in Technology Early Career Winner in 2011. Lan joined CIMMYT in a post-doctoral position and currently works as a scientist to improve wheat’s resistance to rust.

Rust is a fungal disease that uses wheat plants as a host, sucking vital nutrients and sugars from the plant leaving it to wither and die. Without intervention, wheat rust spreads due to the release of billions of spores, which travel by wind to other plants, crops, regions or countries. Spores have the potential to start new infection, ravage crops and threaten global food security.

The science behind building genetic resistance takes two forms known as major (or race-specific) genes and adult-plant resistance based on minor genes. Major resistance genes protect the wheat plants from infection by specific strains of rust. While adult plant resistance, Lan’s area of specialization, stunts the pathogen by reducing the infection frequency and limiting its nutrient intake from the host wheat plant. Some of the longer-lasting adult-plant resistance genes have been shown to provide protection against multiple diseases for decades and have not succumbed to a mutated strain of rust so far.

Replacing wheat crops for varieties bred with several rust-resistant genes acts as a safeguard for occasions when the pathogen mutates to overcome one resistant gene as the others continue the defense, Lan said.

Lan has identified a number of rust resistant genes in CIMMYT germplasm and developed molecular markers, which are fragments of DNA associated with a specific location in the genome. However, as new races of the disease emerge and old ones continue to spread, research identifying durable and multiple rust resistant genes and breeding them into crops is of high importance, she said.

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

MEXICO CITY (CIMMYT) – Scientist Bhoja Raj Basnet knows first hand what it is like to be a smallholder farmer.

Basnet’s earliest memories were formed on a one-acre subsistence farm in Jhapa, in southeastern Nepal, a fertile area in a country where the livelihoods of nearly 65 percent of people depend on agriculture.

The tiny farm provided the foundation for a journey that led ultimately to a doctoral degree in the United States and a career as a wheat breeder in Mexico at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

Wheat plays a major role in Nepal’s agricultural landscape. It is the country’s third largest crop, cultivated on about 750,000 hectares of arable land each year with an average yield of 2.5 tons per hectare.  Above wheat, farmers favor only rice and maize.

“I grew up playing with the plants and soil on my family’s farm and before I entered high school I knew I wanted to pursue a career in agricultural science.” Basnet explained. “As I got older I started to realize the importance of agriculture and how agriculture can really shape a child’s health and future. This is what really pushed me to pursue my career.”

Basnet went on to earn his master and doctoral degrees in plant breeding. After graduation in 2012 from Texas A&M University, Basnet joined CIMMYT as a postdoctoral fellow working in the bread wheat improvement program.

In 2014, Basnet began leading a project conducting research into hybrid wheat in collaboration with Syngenta, which involves researching and developing tools and technology for developing commercially viable hybrid CIMMYT wheat varieties.

Hybrid wheat is created when a breeder intentionally crosses two genetically distinct and stable wheat lines to produce an offspring that combines the best traits of the parents. The process of developing a hybrid can take years, as traits are carefully chosen to achieve desired characteristics, such as increased grain yield or stress tolerance.

The principle behind hybrid varieties is exploitation of heterosis, the superiority of the hybrid offspring over its parent varieties. This is a biological phenomenon observed in almost all living organisms. However, the magnitude of “heterosis” varies significantly based on several biological and environmental factors.

“Hybrid wheat has always fascinated me,” Basnet said, adding, “I really want to see the end results and to see this work succeed.”

Hybrid wheat varieties have proven to be tricky. In fact, CIMMYT’s first attempt to develop hybrid wheat occurred in the 1960s and despite stops and starts over the years, has been ongoing since 2010.

Increasing investment and long-term funding commitments are a key prerequisite to achieving success in crop improvement, especially in breeding, Basnet said. Unlike traditional wheat variety development, successful research into hybrid wheat varieties depends largely on the willingness and active engagement of private sectors into research and seed businesses.

Basnet is working to develop a hybrid wheat foundation at CIMMYT by using new technology and existing research on hybrids. This hybrid wheat foundation will create genetic diversity within wheat to increase genetic gains and develop tools that can produce large amounts of hybrid seed.

“Currently less than one percent of wheat crops globally are hybrid wheat,” Basnet explained. “We need to continue with this research, as hybrid crops could lead to 15 to 20 percent greater yield potential and in particular higher stability, a very important trait with climate change.”

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Carolina Sansaloni’s passion for genetics began when she was at Universidad de Misiones in Posadas, Misiones, Argentina, an interest that grew as she moved on to receive her master’s and doctoral degrees in molecular biology at Universidad de Brasilia in Brazil.

While completing her doctorate degree, Sansaloni travelled to Canberra, Australia to research the genomic structure of the eucalyptus tree at Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT), learning the ins and outs of sequencing technology.

In 2012, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) wanted to introduce the DArT genotyping technologies to Mexico to serve the needs of the Mexican maize and wheat research communities, and once Sansaloni finished her doctoral degree, she was an obvious choice to lead this initiative.

Working under the MasAgro Biodiversidad project in partnership with DArT, INIFAP and CIMMYT, Sansaloni helped to build the Genetic Analysis Service for Agriculture (SAGA in Spanish) from the ground up.

The service, managed by the CIMMYT-based Seeds of Discovery (SeeD) initiative, brings cutting edge genotyping capacity and genetic analysis capability to Mexico. The facility provides unique insights into the genetic variation of wheat and maize at a “sequence level.” Use of the vast quantities of data generated help understand genetic control of characteristics evaluated at a plant or crop level for example, height variations among wheat varieties.

SAGA’s services are available for all CIMMYT scientists, universities, national agriculture research programs and private companies. Worldwide, few other platforms produce this kind of data and most are inaccessible to scientists working at publicly funded institutions because their economic or logistics difficulties.

“When it comes to genotyping technology, it doesn’t matter what type of organism you are working with. It could be wheat, eucalyptus or chicken –  the machine will work the same way,” explained Sansaloni.

Sansaloni has also been focusing her time on the wheat Global Diversity Analysis, which characterizes and analyzes seeds in genebanks at both CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA). Her team has characterized approximately 100,000 wheat accessions including 40 percent of the CIMMYT genebank and almost 100 percent of the ICARDA genebank wheat collection. This is an incredible and unique resource for wheat scientists providing a genetic framework to facilitate selection of the most relevant accessions for breeding.

“Currently only five to eight percent of materials in the genebank are being used in the breeding programs,” Sansaloni said. “The Global Diversity Analysis could have huge impacts on the future of wheat yields. It is like discovering the pieces of a puzzle, and then beginning to understand how these pieces can fit together to build excellent varieties of wheat.”

Sansaloni’s goal is to combine information from CIMMYT and ICARDA, making the information accessible to the entire wheat community and eventually enhancing breeding programs across the globe.

“Working at CIMMYT has been an invaluable experience,” Sansaloni said. “I’ve had the opportunity to work and collaborate with so many different people, and it’s brought me from the laboratory into the wheat fields, which really brings me closer to my work.”

SeeD is a joint initiative of CIMMYT and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture (SAGARPA) through the MasAgro project. SeeD receives additional funding from the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize (MAIZE CRP) and Wheat (WHEAT CRP), and from the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at 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.”

Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Maize has always been an integral part of Jiafa Chen’s life.

Chen, a statistical and molecular geneticist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), has helped identify new genetic resources that have the potential to be used to breed new maize varieties that withstand a variety of environmental and biological stresses. He has also played a significant role in the development of a recent partnership between CIMMYT and Henan Agricultural University (HAU) in China.

Born in Henan – a province in the fertile Yellow River Valley known for its maize and wheat production – Chen’s family grew maize, which was a major source of income and led to his interest in breeding the crop as a means to help small farmers in China. He went on to study agriculture at HAU, where he focused on maize at a molecular level throughout undergraduate and graduate school, then came to CIMMYT as a postdoctoral researcher in 2013.

“Coming to CIMMYT was natural for me,” Chen said. “CIMMYT’s genebank – which holds over 28,000 maize accessions – offered a wide array of genetic resources that could help to breed varieties resistant to disease and abiotic stress which are large challenges in my country.”

Over Chen’s four years at CIMMYT headquarters near Mexico City, he has helped characterize CIMMYT’s entire maize genebank using DArTseq, a genetic fingerprinting method that can be used to help identify new genes related to traits like tolerance to heat under climate change, or resistance to disease.  This research is being used to develop maize germplasm with new genetic variation for drought tolerance and resistance to tar spot complex disease.

“Conserving and utilizing biodiversity is crucial to ensure food security for future generations,” Chen said. “For example, all modern maize varieties currently grown have narrow genetic diversity compared to CIMMYT’s genebank, which holds some genetic diversity valuable to breed new varieties that suit future environments under climate change. CIMMYT and other genebanks, which contain numerous crop varieties, are our only resource that can offer the native diversity we need to achieve food security in the future.”

Chen moved back to China this month to begin research at HAU as an assistant professor, where he will continue to focus on discovering new genes associated with resistance to different stresses. Chen was the first student from HAU to come to CIMMYT, and has served as a bridge between the institutions that officially launched a new joint Maize and Wheat Research Center during a signing ceremony last week.

The new center will focus on research and training, and will host four international senior scientists with expertise in genomics, informatics, physiology and crop management. It will be fully integrated into CIMMYT’s global activities and CIMMYT’s current collaboration in China with the Chinese Agricultural Academy of Sciences.

“I think through the new center, CIMMYT will offer HAU the opportunity to enhance agricultural systems in China, and will have a stronger impact at the farm level than ever before,” Chen said. “I also think HAU will have more of an opportunity to be involved with more global agricultural research initiatives, and become a world-class university.”