CIMMYT stands out for its role in agricultural innovation, demonstrated through the dedicated research of visiting Chinese scholar Wang Hui. Her tenure at CIMMYT underscores the center’s pivotal role in driving agricultural advancements through international partnerships, significantly contributing to global food security and scientific development.
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Ethiopia is the largest wheat producer in East Africa, with about 65% share of the total wheat production in sub-Saharan Africa. The area under wheat increased from about 1.5 million hectares in 2010 to 2.5 million hectares in 2023. More importantly, the productivity increased from 1.8 tons per hectare to about 3 tons per hectare in the same period, implying an increase of about 5% per annum in productivity (See Figure 1).
Several factors have contributed to this spectacular increase in productivity, including better farm practices implemented through clustering farmers land to reduce production costs, and introducing new, improved varieties which enable farmers to withstand challenges of crop diseases.
A DNA finger printing study found that about 87% of the wheat area in Ethiopia comprises of varieties developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). In 2023, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) released six new wheat varieties of CIMMYT origin aimed for the mid to highlands (> 1800 meters above sea level) and lowlands (< 1800 masl) of the country. “These newly released varieties provide options for farmers to face devastating rust diseases and at the same time obtain higher productivity,” said wheat breeder Leonardo Crespo.
Gadisa Alemu, wheat breeder based in EIAR, Kulumsa, added that the CIMMYT varieties were tested in farmers’ fields prior to release. “This allows participating farmers to have quicker access to seed of selected varieties,” he said.
Wheat breeders . The aim was to obtain additional insights into the activities of CIMMYT’s partners and co-design a strategy that allows early evaluation and access to CIMMYT germplasm by national partners in Ethiopia. The team visited research centers in Holetta (highlands), Debre Zeit and, Kulumsa (midlands), and Arsi Negele (lowlands). Kulumsa, together with the highlands of Meraro and Asasa plains, represent about 60-70% of the wheat area in Ethiopia. “These are important sites for wheat breeding activities in Ethiopia. Given that Holetta and Debre Zeit are hot spots for diseases, there is an increased interest in the Arsi Negele region to expand wheat production under irrigated conditions,” said Bekele Abeyo, wheat breeder and CIMMYT’s Ethiopia Country Representative.
AGG Maize and Wheat Improvement Teams Meet with Partners to Develop CG-NARES Breeding Strategy
In the first fortnight of September 2023, researchers from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and National Agriculture Research and Extension System (NARES) met in Nairobi, Kenya to create high-level strategies and guiding principles for CG-NARES breeding activities. This is in alignment with the ‘Genetic Innovations’ initiative of the One CGIAR strategy. CIMMYT representation included breeding teams from the wheat, maize, and dryland crops. The meetings were organized by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and CIMMYT’s Accelerating Genetic Gains in Maize and Wheat (AGG) project team.
It was recognized that the aforesaid strategies and principles need to be based on the biology of the crops and the context of each breeding program; incorporate the logistics of the breeding operations; and implement data driven tools for decision making such as genomic selection.
Participants shared how the application of novel and innovative technologies shortens the breeding cycles, accelerates the rate of genetic gain, and provides tools to enable the evaluation of plant materials (future variety candidates) and future target environments where these varieties will be grown.
It was concluded that effective breeding networks can be a strong instrument to enable faster delivery of improved germplasm to farmers. For this to happen efficiently, the networks require a high degree of coordination, organizational structure, governance, and clarity of roles. “It is fundamental for network members to agree the objectives, vision and expected outcomes of collaborative activities. This forms the basis for co-design and co-implementation of crop improvement plans” said Kevin Pixley, Interim Director of the Global Wheat Program and Director of the Dryland Crops Program.
The meeting also served as a platform for AGG’s and dryland crop’s breeding teams to exchange ideas and experiences. For instance, the Maize team shared their experience and learnings from on-farm-testing activities. The Wheat team shared the evolution and path of breeding modernization and implementation of new technologies. The Dryland Crops team shared their experience with co-designing and co-implementing breeding networks with NARES partners in Africa.
More than 20 participants attended the genetic resources and seed production courses given by researchers from the Global Maize Program of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), from October 24 to 28 in Antigua, Guatemala. Among the attendees were technicians and researchers from the Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology (ICTA, for its acronym in Spanish), as well as students from Universidad Rafael Landívar and the University Centers of Chimaltenango (CUNDECH, in Spanish) and Quiché (CUSACQ, in Spanish) of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.
Thanks to the support of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE, in Spanish), the National Council for Protected Areas (CONAP, in Spanish) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), these courses contributed to the development of a biosafety project, supported by GEF and UNEP, to complete the implementation process of the Cartagena Protocol through an innovative approach that promotes a strong link between biotechnology and biodiversity. In addition, it sought to strengthen capacities in the performance and interpretation of molecular analyses and promote the generational change that is gradually taking place in this Central American country.
Activities began on October 24 and 25 with the course on Statistics Applied to Genetic Resources given by Juan Burgueño, Head of CIMMYT’s Biometrics and Statistics Unit, to students from the aforementioned universities and ICTA staff interested in the analysis of molecular data for the purpose of characterizing accessions and the formation of core collections in germplasm banks. On the 26 and 27 of the same month, César Petroli, a specialist in high-throughput genotyping at CIMMYT, offered a course on biotechnology and high-throughput genotyping.
At the same time, Alberto Chassaigne, curator of the Maize Collection of CIMMYT’s germplasm bank, participated in the course on Genetic Resources and Management of Germplasm Banks. He explained the management of CIMMYT’s germplasm bank, the processes that are carried out and the partnerships with ICTA on work with community seed banks and the plans of both institutions for 2023. Also, as a specialist in Seed Systems, Chassaigne and Ubaldo Marcos, research assistant in CIMMYT’s Maize Seed Systems area, gave a course on Maize Seed Production. This course was aimed at staff in charge of the production of basic and certified seed at ICTA. This course concluded with a field day at the Regional Research Center of the South (CISUR, in Spanish), Cuyuta, Escuintla, where participants asked the specialists questions while visiting a maize seed production plot.
In turn, María de los Ángeles Mérida, a researcher specializing in genetic resources from ICTA, who organized these courses, spoke about the collection and conservation of native varieties of maize in Guatemala. Additionally, César Azurdia, CONAP biodiversity advisor, gave a presentation on wild relatives of different crops in Guatemala. Leslie Melisa Ojeda C. (CONAP) also participated, and spoke about the issue of legislation on crop wild relatives; and, Mynor Otzoy, a researcher from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, spoke about the collection and morphological characterization of cocoa germplasm in Guatemala.
Along the path of constant strengthening of collaboration ties with countries, course participants highlighted their interest and need to continue this type of training. In 2023, it is expected to facilitate a team training with Ubaldo Marcos and Félix San Vicente, CIMMYT maize breeder for Latin America. It should be noted that, within the framework of the CGIAR germplasm bank initiative, the objective will be to replicate this experience in other Latin American countries and increase participation in community seed banks (ex situ and in situ banks).
Food crops and animal feeds produced through biotechnology innovations can now be imported into Kenya after the ban on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) was lifted.
Kenyan scientists and research institutions are now able to develop crop varieties that will benefit farmers and their communities.
In a landmark statement on October 3, the Cabinet said: “In accordance with the recommendation of the Task Force to review matters relating to GMOs and Food Safety, and in fidelity with the guidelines of the National Biosafety Authority (NBA) on all applicable international treaties including the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (CPB), Cabinet vacated its earlier decision of 8th November 2012 prohibiting the open cultivation of GMOs and the importation of food crops and animal feeds produced through biotechnology innovations; effectively lifting the ban on GMOs. By dint of the executive action open cultivation and importation of white (GMO) maize is now authorized.”
Read the original article: Kenya Lifts 10-year Ban On GM Foods, Allows Open Cultivation, Importation Of White GM Maize
Cover photo: A decade-long ban on genetically modified foods has been lifted in Kenya. (Photo: New Nigerian Newspaper)
Analysis of evidence by scientists of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and CGIAR concludes that the scientific risks of genome editing are similar to those of traditional breeding: all new varieties, however developed, need to be tested for agronomic performance in a range of environments.
Social risks are mainly that these powerful technologies may be rendered inaccessible to less-commercial crops and farmers if intellectual property (IP) and regulatory policies make them expensive or difficult to use.
Genome editing has demonstrated potential to contribute to food security, improved nutrition, and value addition for farmers and consumers.
Many countries are still uncertain about whether to grow, or if and how to regulate genome-edited crop varieties. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has stated that genome-edited crops should be considered as transgenics in the EU for regulatory purposes, a decision that could limit their use in Africa. On the other hand, several countries, including USA, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Kenya, Nigeria, Israel, India, and Japan have determined that genome-edited crops should not be regulated like transgenics if they do not contain foreign DNA.
Policies should enable choice and avoid the risk that genome editing technologies for crops benefit only those who can pay premium price. Smallholder farmers should have equal access to advanced technologies, should they wish to use them, as well as relevant and objective information about their value and how to use them.
Read the full study: Genome-edited crops for improved food security of smallholder farmers
CIMMYT Position Statement on Novel Genome Editing Technologies in Crops
In just a decade, CRISPR has become one of the most celebrated inventions in modern biology. It is swiftly changing how medical researchers study diseases: Cancer biologists are using the method to discover hidden vulnerabilities of tumor cells. Doctors are using CRISPR to edit genes that cause hereditary diseases.
But CRISPR’s influence extends far beyond medicine. Evolutionary biologists are using the technology to study Neanderthal brains and to investigate how our ape ancestors lost their tails. Plant biologists have edited seeds to produce crops with new vitamins or with the ability to withstand diseases. Some of them may reach supermarket shelves in the next few years.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/science/crispr-gene-editing-10-years.html
The three rust diseases, yellow (stripe) rust, black (stem) rust, and brown (left) rust occur in most wheat production environments, causing substantial yield losses and under serious epidemics, can threaten the global wheat supply.
CIMMYT is one of the largest providers of elite germplasm to national partners in over 80 countries. CIMMYT nurseries, known for research in developing adaptive, high-yielding and high-quality germplasm, also carry resistance to several biotic and abiotic stresses, such as rust disease.
Through years of research and experience, CIMMYT has found that durable control of wheat rusts can be achieved by developing and deploying wheat varieties with complex adult-plant resistance (APR). A combination of both conventional and modern technologies in APR will enable breeders to address the problem of rusts and other diseases and continue progress in delivering higher genetic gains, a key goal of the Accelerating Genetic Gains in Maize and Wheat (AGG) project.
Learn more about CIMMYT’s APR strategy: CIMMYT Strategy for Adult Plant Resistance (APR)
For more information on CIMMYT’s APR strategy, contact CIMMYT’s Head of Wheat Rust Pathology and Molecular Genetics, Sridhar Bhavani.
For scientists, determining how best to increase wheat yields to meet food demand is a persistent challenge, particularly as the trend toward sustainably intensifying production on agricultural lands grows.
The United Nations projects that the current global population of 7.6 billion will increase to more than 9.8 billion by 2050, making higher grain yield potential vital, particularly as climate instability increases due to global warming. International efforts are also focused on meeting the Zero Hunger target detailed in the UN Sustainable Development Goals before they expire in 2030.
Now, a new landmark research survey on the grain yield potential and climate-resilience of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) has brought scientists a few strides closer to meeting their ambitions.
Grain yield has traditionally been an elusive trait in genomic wheat breeding because of its quantitative genetic control, which means that it is controlled by many genomic regions with small effects.
Challenges also include a lack of good understanding about the genetic basis of grain yield, inconsistent grain yield quantitative trait loci identified in different environments, low heritability of grain yield across environments and environment interactions of grain yield.
To dissect the genetic architecture of wheat grain yield for the purposes of the research, which appeared in Scientific Reports, researchers implemented a large-scale genome-wide association study based on 100 datasets and 105,000 grain yield observations from 55,568 wheat breeding lines developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
They evaluated the lines between 2003 and 2019 in different sites, years, planting systems, irrigation systems and abiotic stresses at CIMMYT’s primary yield testing site, the Norman E. Borlaug Experimental Research Station, Ciudad Obregon, Mexico, and in an additional eight countries — including Afghanistan, India and Myanmar — through partnerships with national programs.
The researchers also generated the grain-yield associated marker profiles and analyzed the grain-yield favorable allele frequencies for a large panel of 73,142 wheat lines, resulting in 44.5 million data points. The marker profiles indicated that the CIMMYT global wheat germplasm is rich in grain yield favorable alleles and is a trove for breeders to choose parents and design strategic crosses based on complementary grain yield alleles at desired loci.
“By dissecting the genetic basis of the elusive grain-yield trait, the resources presented in our study provide great opportunities to accelerate genomic breeding for high-yielding and climate-resilient wheat varieties, which is a major objective of the Accelerating Genetic Gain in Maize and Wheat project,” said CIMMYT wheat breeder Philomin Juliana.
“This study is unique and the largest-of-its-kind focusing on elucidating the genetic architecture of wheat grain yield,” she explained, “a highly complex and economically important trait that will have great implications on future diagnostic marker development, gene discovery, marker-assisted selection and genomic-breeding in wheat.”
Currently, crop breeding methods and agronomic management put annual productivity increases at 1.2% a year, but to ensure food security for future generations, productivity should be at 2.4% a year.
So, the extensive datasets and results presented in this study are expected to provide a framework for breeders to design effective strategies for mitigating the effects of climate change, while ensuring food-sustainability and security.
On December 11, 2020, the Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) announced the release of six new wheat varieties for multiplication and distribution to the country’s wheat farmers, offering increased production for Nepal’s nearly one million wheat farmers and boosted nutrition for its 28 million wheat consumers.
The varieties, which are derived from materials developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), include five bred for elevated levels of the crucial micronutrient zinc, and Borlaug 100, a variety well known for being high yielding, drought- and heat-resilient, and resistant to wheat blast, as well as high in zinc.
“Releasing six varieties in one attempt is historic news for Nepal,” said CIMMYT Asia Regional Representative and Principal Scientist Arun Joshi.
“It is an especially impressive achievement by the NARC breeders and technicians during a time of COVID-related challenges and restrictions,” said NARC Executive Director Deepak Bhandari.
“This was a joint effort by many scientists in our team who played a critical role in generating proper data, and making a strong case for these varieties to the release committee, ” said Roshan Basnet, head of the National Wheat Research Program based in Bhairahawa, Nepal, who was instrumental in releasing three of the varieties, including Borlaug 2020.
“We are very glad that our hard work has paid off for our country’s farmers,” said Dhruba Thapa, chief and wheat breeder at NARC’s National Plant Breeding and Genetics Research Centre.
Nepal produces 1.96 million tons of wheat on more than 750,000 hectares, but its wheat farmers are mainly smallholders with less than 1-hectare holdings and limited access to inputs or mechanization. In addition, most of the popular wheat varieties grown in the country have become susceptible to new strains of wheat rust diseases.
The new varieties — Zinc Gahun 1, Zinc Gahun 2, Bheri-Ganga, Himganga, Khumal-Shakti and Borlaug 2020 — were bred and tested using a “fast-track” approach, with CIMMYT and NARC scientists moving material from trials in CIMMYT’s research station in Mexico to multiple locations in Nepal and other Target Population of Environments (TPEs) for testing.
“Thanks to a big effort from Arun Joshi and our NARC partners we were able to collect important data in first year, reducing the time it takes to release new varieties,” said CIMMYT Head of Wheat Improvement Ravi Singh.
The varieties are tailored for conditions in a range of wheat growing regions in the country — from the hotter lowland, or Terai, regions to the irrigated as well as dryer mid- and high-elevation areas — and for stresses including wheat rust diseases and wheat blast. The five high-zinc, biofortified varieties were developed through conventional crop breeding by crossing modern high yielding wheats with high zinc progenitors such as landraces, spelt wheat and emmer wheat.
“Zinc deficiency is a serious problem in Nepal, with 21% of children found to be zinc deficient in 2016,” explained said CIMMYT Senior Scientist and wheat breeder Velu Govindan, who specializes in breeding biofortified varieties. “Biofortification of staple crops such as wheat is a proven method to help reverse and prevent this deficiency, especially for those without access to a more diverse diet.”
Borlaug 2020 is equivalent to Borlaug 100, a highly prized variety released in 2014 in adbMexico to commemorate the centennial year of Nobel Peace laureate Norman E. Borlaug. Coincidently, its release in Nepal coincides with the 50th anniversary of Borlaug’s Nobel Peace Prize.
NARC staff have already begun the process of seed multiplication and conducting participatory varietal selection trials with farmers, so very soon farmers throughout the country will benefit from these seeds.
“The number of new varieties and record release time is amazing,” said Joshi. “We now have varieties that will help Nepal’s farmers well into the future.”
CIMMYT breeding of biofortified varieties was funded by HarvestPlus. Variety release and seed multiplication activities in Nepal were supported by NARC and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) through collaboration with ADB Natural Resources Principal & Agriculture Specialist Michiko Katagami. This NARC-ADB-CIMMYT collaboration was prompted by World Food Prize winner and former HarvestPlus CEO Howarth Bouis, and provided crucial support that enabled the release in a record time.
RELATED RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS:
INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES:
Arun Joshi, Asia Regional Representative and Principal Scientist, CIMMYT
FOR MORE INFORMATION, OR TO ARRANGE INTERVIEWS, CONTACT:
Marcia MacNeil, Communications Officer, CIMMYT m.macneil@cgiar.org.
ABOUT CIMMYT:
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is the global leader in publicly-funded maize and wheat research and related farming systems. Headquartered near Mexico City, CIMMYT works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to sustainably increase the productivity of maize and wheat cropping systems, thus improving global food security and reducing poverty. CIMMYT is a member of the CGIAR System and leads the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat and the Excellence in Breeding Platform. The Center receives support from national governments, foundations, development banks and other public and private agencies. For more information, visit staging.cimmyt.org.
ABOUT NARC:
Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) was established in 1991 as an autonomous organization under Nepal Agricultural Research Council Act – 1991 to conduct agricultural research in the country to uplift the economic level of Nepalese people.
ABOUT ADB:
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is committed to achieving a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia and the Pacific, while sustaining its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty. It assists its members and partners by providing loans, technical assistance, grants, and equity investments to promote social and economic development.
Global wheat production is currently facing great challenges, from increasing climate variation to occurrence of various pests and diseases. These factors continue to limit wheat production in a number of countries, including China, where in 2018 unseasonably cold temperatures resulted in yield reduction of more than 10% in major wheat growing regions. Around the same time, Fusarium head blight spread from the Yangtze region to the Yellow and Huai Valleys, and northern China experienced a shortage of irrigated water.
In light of these ongoing challenges, international collaboration, as well as the development of new technologies and their integration with existing ones, has a key role to play in supporting sustainable wheat improvement, especially in developing countries. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) has been collaborating with China on wheat improvement for over 40 years, driving significant progress in a number of areas.
Notably, a standardized protocol for testing Chinese noodle quality has been established, as has a methodology for breeding adult-plant resistance to yellow rust, leaf rust and powdery mildew. More than 330 cultivars derived from CIMMYT germplasm have been released in the country and are currently grown over 9% of the Chinese wheat production area, while physiological approaches have been used to characterize yield potential and develop high-efficiency phenotyping platforms. The development of climate-resilient cultivars using new technology will be a priority area for future collaboration.
In a special issue of Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering focused on wheat genetics and breeding, CIMMYT researchers present highlights from global progress in wheat genomics, breeding for disease resistance, as well as quality improvement, in a collection of nine review articles and one research article. They emphasize the significance of using new technology for genotyping and phenotyping when developing new cultivars, as well as the importance of global collaboration in responding to ongoing challenges.
In a paper on wheat stem rust, CIMMYT scientists Sridhar Bhavani, David Hodson, Julio Huerta-Espino, Mandeep Randawa and Ravi Singh discuss progress in breeding for resistance to Ug99 and other races of stem rust fungus, complex virulence combinations of which continue to pose a significant threat to global wheat production. The authors detail how effective gene stewardship and new generation breeding materials, complemented by active surveillance and monitoring, have helped to limit major epidemics and increase grain yield potential in key target environments.
In the same issue, an article by Caiyun Lui et al. discusses the application of spectral reflectance indices (SRIs) as proxies to screen for yield potential and heat stress, which is emerging in crop breeding programs. The results of a recent study, which evaluated 287 elite lines, highlight the utility of SRIs as proxies for grain yield. High heritability estimates and the identification of marker-trait associations indicate that SRIs are useful tools for understanding the genetic basis of agronomic and physiological traits.
Other papers by CIMMYT researchers discuss the history, activities and impact of the International Winter Wheat Improvement Program, as well as the ongoing work on the genetic improvement of wheat grain quality at CIMMYT.
Find the full collection of articles in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering, Volume 6, Issue 3, September 2019.
See more recent publications by CIMMYT researchers:
To meet the demand for wheat from a rising and quickly urbanizing population, wheat yields in farmers’ fields must increase by an estimated 1.5% each year through 2030.
Of all the factors that influence yield, grain weight is the trait that is most stable and heritable for use in breeding improved wheat varieties. Breeders measure this by thousand grain weight (TGW).
Over the years, molecular scientists have made efforts to identify genes related to increased TGW, in order to speed up breeding through marker-assisted selection (MAS). Using MAS, breeders can select parents that contain genes related to the traits they are looking for, increasing the likelihood they will be passed on and incorporated in a new variety.
There have been some limited successes in these efforts: in the past years, a few genes related to increased TGW have been cloned, and a set of genetic markers have been determined to be used for MAS. However, the effects of most of these candidate genes have not yet been validated in diverse sets of wheat germplasm throughout the world that represent the full range of global wheat growing environments.
A group of wheat geneticists and molecular breeders from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) has recently conducted a thorough study to confirm the effects of the favorable alleles reported for these genes on TGW in CIMMYT wheat, and to identify new genetic determinants of this desired trait.
They found some good news and some bad news.
First, the good news: focusing on more than 4,000 lines of CIMMYT wheat germplasm they found 15 haplotype blocks significantly associated with TGW. Four haplotype blocks associated with TGW were also associated with grain yield — a grand prize for breeders, because in general the positive association of grain yield with TGW is less profound and sometimes even negative. However, of the 14 genes that had been previously reported to increase TGW, only one in CIMMYT’s 2015-2016 Elite Yield Trial and two in Wheat Associative Mapping Initiative panel were shown to have significant TGW associations.
The scientists also found that the alleles — pairs of genes on a chromosome that determine heredity — that were supposedly favorable to TGW actually decreased it. These candidate genes also appear to vary in their TGW effects with genetic background and/or environment.
Thus, these findings also provide a foundation for more detailed investigations, opening the door for more studies on the genetic background dependence and environment sensitivity of the known candidate genes for TGW.
“Our findings indicate that it will be challenging to use MAS based on these existing markers across individual breeding programs,” said Deepmala Sehgal, CIMMYT wheat geneticist and the primary author of the study.
However, efforts to identify new genetic determinants of TGW were promising. The authors’ study of CIMMYT germplasm found one locus on chromosome 6A that showed increases of up to 2.60 grams in TGW and up to 258 kilograms per hectare in grain yield.
This discovery expands opportunities for developing diagnostic markers to assist in multi-gene pyramiding — a process that can derive new and complementary allele combinations for enhanced wheat TGW and grain yield.
Most of all, the study highlights the strong need for better and more validation of the genes related to this and other traits, so that breeders can be sure they are using material that is confirmed to increase wheat grain weight and genetic yield.
“Our findings are very promising for future efforts to efficiently develop more productive wheat in both grain weight and grain yield,” said Sehgal. “This ultimately means more bread on household tables throughout the world.”
“Validation of Candidate Gene-Based Markers and Identification of Novel Loci for Thousand-Grain Weight in Spring Bread Wheat” in Frontiers in Plant Science by Deepmala Sehgal, Suchismita Mondal, Carlos Guzman, Guillermo Garcia Barrios, Carolina Franco, Ravi Singh and Susanne Dreisigacker was supported by funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT), the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Department for International Development (DFID), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics.
Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2019.01189
Despite the severe social and political unrest that constrain agriculture in Afghanistan, many farmers are growing high-yielding, disease resistant varieties developed through international, science-based breeding and made available to farmers as part of partnerships with national wheat experts and seed producers.
These and other findings have emerged from the first-ever large-scale use of DNA fingerprinting to assess Afghanistan farmers’ adoption of improved wheat varieties, which are replacing less productive local varieties and landraces, according to a paper published yesterday in the science journal BMC Genomics.
The study is part of an activity supported between 2003 and 2018 by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, through which the Agricultural Research Institute of Afghanistan and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) introduced, tested, and released improved wheat varieties.
“As part of our study, we established an extensive ‘reference library’ of released varieties, elite breeding lines, and Afghan wheat landraces,” said Susanne Dreisigacker, wheat molecular breeder at CIMMYT and lead author of the new paper.
“We then compared wheat collected on farmers’ fields with the reference library. Of the 560 wheat samples collected in 4 provinces during 2015-16, farmers misidentified more than 40%, saying they were of a different variety from that which our DNA analyses later identified.”
Wheat is the most important staple crop in Afghanistan — more than 20 million of the country’s rural inhabitants depend on it — but wheat production is unstable and Afghanistan has been importing between 2 and 3 million tons of grain each year to meet demand.
Over half of the population lives below the poverty line, with high rates of malnutrition. A key development aim in Afghanistan is to foster improved agronomic practices and the use of high quality seed of improved wheat varieties, which together can raise yields by over 50%.
“Fungal diseases, particularly yellow rust and stem rust, pose grave threats to wheat in the country,” said Eric Huttner, research program manager for crops at the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and co-author of the present paper. “It’s crucial to know which wheat varieties are being grown where, in order to replace the susceptible ones with high-performing, disease resistant varieties.”
Varietal adoption studies typically rely on questionnaires completed by breeders, extension services, seed producers, seed suppliers, and farmers, but such surveys are complicated, expensive, and often inaccurate.
“DNA fingerprinting resolves uncertainties regarding adoption and improves related socioeconomic research and farm policies,” Huttner explained, adding that for plant breeding this technology has been used mostly to protect intellectual property, such as registered breeding lines and varieties in more developed economies.
This new study was commissioned by ACIAR as a response to a request from the Government of Afghanistan for assistance in characterizing the Afghan wheat gene bank, according to Huttner.
“This provided the reference library against which farmers’ samples could be compared,” he explained. “Accurately identifying the varieties that farmers grow is key evidence on the impact of introducing improved varieties and will shape our future research
Joint research and development efforts involving CIMMYT, ACIAR, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the International Centre of Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), French Cooperation, and Afghanistan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) and Agricultural Research Institute (ARIA) have introduced more than 400 modern, disease-resistant wheat varieties over the last two decades. Nearly 75% of the wheat grown in the areas surveyed for this study comes from these improved varieties.
“New sequencing technologies are increasingly affordable and their cost will continue to fall,” said Dreisigacker. “Expanded use of DNA fingerprinting can easily and accurately identify the wheat cultivars in farmers’ fields, thus helping to target breeding, agronomy, and development efforts for better food security and farmer livelihoods.”
For more information, or to arrange interviews with the researchers, please contact:
Marcia MacNeil, Wheat Communications Officer, CIMMYT
M.MacNeil@cgiar.org, +52 (55) 5804 2004, ext. 2070
Rodrigo Ordóñez, Communications Manager, CIMMYT
r.ordonez@cgiar.org, +52 (55) 5804 2004, ext. 1167
About CIMMYT
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is the global leader in publicly funded maize and wheat research and related farming systems. Headquartered near Mexico City, CIMMYT works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to sustainably increase the productivity of maize and wheat cropping systems, thus improving global food security and reducing poverty. CIMMYT is a member of CGIAR and leads the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat, and the Excellence in Breeding Platform. The center receives support from national governments, foundations, development banks and other public and private agencies.
About ACIAR
As Australia’s specialist international agricultural research for development agency, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) brokers and funds research partnerships between Australian scientists and their counterparts in developing countries. Since 1982, ACIAR has supported research projects in eastern and southern Africa, East Asia, South and West Asia and the Pacific, focusing on crops, agribusiness, horticulture, forestry, livestock, fisheries, water and climate, social sciences, and soil and land management. ACIAR has commissioned and managed more than 1,500 research projects in 36 countries, partnering with 150 institutions along with more than 50 Australian research organizations.
About Afghanistan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock
The Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan works on the development and modernization of agriculture, livestock and horticulture. The ministry launches programs to support the farmers, manage natural resources, and strengthen agricultural economics. Its programs include the promotion and introduction of higher-value economic crops, strengthening traditional products, identifying and publishing farm-tailored land technologies, boosting cooperative programs, agricultural economics, and export with marketing.
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Through pure coincidence, Susanne Dreisigacker fell into the world of agricultural science and landed in Mexico. Her interest in genetics and biology solidified when she arrived at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) through the University of Hohenheim in Germany to pursue her PhD work. Impressed by CIMMYT’s scientific endeavors and its mission, she found herself permanently back at the institution in 2005 as a resident scientist. Now, as the head of CIMMYT’s Wheat Molecular Breeding Lab, Dreisigacker ensures that wheat breeders use the appropriate wheat material to conduct gene profiling and genome sequencing.
Dreisigacker works to discover and validate molecular markers, or DNA segments, for traits of interest. This information helps breeders to develop improved crop varieties that feature those traits.
At its core, her position centers on defining best practices for genomic tool application in the wheat breeding program. These genomic tools serve as “…indirect selection criteria to ultimately assist breeders select improved outputs at the molecular level, such as disease resistance and enhanced nutritional quality in wheat,” explains Dreisigacker. Furthermore, her research amasses data on grain yield and its corresponding components — such as grain weight and other difficult traits to tackle in the wheat breeding world — to help breeders stabilize high yield rates.
On average, over 40,000 wheat lines a year are analyzed on behalf of breeders under Dreisigacker’s direction. The ultimate challenge is organizing this massive data outcome to effectively support the breeders.
Zooming out from the molecular level
Working in an environment with interdisciplinary characteristics such as a breeding program, it can be difficult to prioritize which traits merit the bulk of her time. Dreisigacker stresses that teamwork is paramount, from breeders to pathologists to quality specialists, as they all share mutual goals, so their efforts “need to intersect in order to be beneficial.” Dreisigacker enjoys interacting among the disciplines and sharing her work with the international wheat community.
Progress in the application of genomic tools and the push for their usefulness inspires Dreisigacker to continue her work with wheat at CIMMYT. Her work in the laboratory is the backbone of the transmission of better quality germplasm from breeders to farmers. “There is a need to more efficiently integrate gene profiling and genome sequencing into breeding. The transition from upstream genomic research to the processes of application and adaptability are overlooked,” says Dreisigacker.
When she is not looking at wheat at the molecular level, you can find her spending time with her husband and young daughter or teaching exercise classes in CIMMYT’s gymnasium.
After 13 years of research, an international team of more than 200 scientists recently cracked the full genome of bread wheat. Considering that wheat has five times more DNA than humans, this is a significant scientific breakthrough. The complete sequencing provides researchers with a map for the location of more than 100,000 genes which, experts say, will help accelerate the development of new wheat varieties.
Philomin Juliana, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in wheat breeding at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) talks about the relevance of the new map for the center, whose genetics figures in the pedigrees of wheat varieties grown on more than 100 million hectares worldwide.
Are you already using this resource, and how?
We have anchored the genotyping-by-sequencing marker data for about 46,000 lines from CIMMYT’s first-year wheat yield trials (2013-2018) to the new, International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) reference sequence (RefSeq v1.0) assembly of the bread wheat genome, with an overall alignment rate of 64%. This has provided valuable information on the location of key genome regions associated with grain yield, disease resistance, agronomic traits and quality in CIMMYT’s wheat germplasm, identified from genome-wide association mapping studies.
We have also used the new reference sequence to understand the impact of marker densities and genomic coverage on the genomic predictability of traits and have gained a better understanding of the contributions of diverse chromosome regions (distal, proximal, and interstitial) towards different phenotypes.
How will use of the new wheat reference sequence help CIMMYT and partners to develop improved wheat for traits of interest?
There are so many ways we can use this new tool! It provides valuable insights into trait genetics and genomics in bread wheat and will help us to more quickly identify candidate genes associated with traits of interest and to clone those genes. We will also be able to design molecular breeding strategies and precisely select and introgress target regions of the genome.
More generally, the reference sequence already has a range of markers — among them, simple sequence repeats (SSR), diversity array technologies (DArT) markers, and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) — anchored to it, which will facilitate comparisons between mapping studies and the quick development and validation of useful new markers.
It will also help to apply tools like gene-editing to obtain desired phenotypes and will allow us to better characterize the genetic diversity in CIMMYT’s wheat, to identify useful genes in key CIMMYT parent lines and rapidly introgress them into breeding lines.
With the annotated whole genome information, breeders can design crosses focused directly on desired combinations of genomic regions or predict the outcome of crosses involving gene combinations.
It will definitely speed varietal testing in partner countries through quick and accurate molecular screens for the presence of desired genes, instead of having to perform multiple generations of field testing.
Finally, it will help us to detect molecular-level differences between CIMMYT varieties released in different countries.
Which traits are being targeted by CIMMYT and partners?
We are using the new reference sequence to understand better the molecular bases of grain yield, heat and drought tolerance, rust resistance, flowering time, maturity, plant height, grain and flour protein, and various other quality traits.
A recipient of Monsanto’s Beachell-Borlaug International Scholars Program Award, Juliana completed a Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University in 2016. Her work at CIMMYT seeks to identify the genetic bases of key traits in CIMMYT wheat germplasm and to assess high-throughput genotyping and phenotyping to increase the rate of genetic gain for yield in the center’s bread wheat breeding. In this work, she partners with the Cornell-led Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project and Jesse Poland of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Kansas State University. Her research also forms part of USAID’s Feed the Future projects.
