On the breeding edge

Developments in conventional plant breeding continue to bring improvements in yield, quality, consistency and ease of management on farm. Advanced crop analytics support and accelerate variety selection to bring the most useful genetic characteristics through from a virtual plant to reality in the glasshouse and in the field.

Plant breeding has been defined as the art and science of managing the genetics of plants for the benefit of humankind. At the heart of DEKALB innovation, advanced breeding techniques play an essential role in bringing to market new, high-performance hybrids that are helping agriculture meet the challenges ahead. Here’s how…

Today, growers face challenges from every direction. More than ever they must achieve more with less as they seek to operate profitable businesses in the face of volatile commodity prices and rising energy costs.

Environmental factors make new demands, pressuring growers to adopt new, sustainable practices and hybrids that reduce risk and use natural resources more efficiently. Perhaps more than any other time in history, successful farming is linked to the ability to harness the advantages of science and technology, towards providing better and more abundant food supplies and raw materials that are vital to our changing societies.

Over the years DEKALB has provided growers with seeds that capture the potential of science, translating to consistently higher yields, resistance to disease and insect pressure consistently efficient and robust across a wide range of local growing conditions. Breeding technologies have seen extremely rapid evolution over recent years and innovation has played an important role in the development of DEKALB products.

Traditional plant breeding techniques, focusing on the cross breeding of plants to introduce desirable traits, has been enhanced with extremely sophisticated molecular biology techniques to create new and better varieties. In recent years, new and innovative plant-breeding technologies taking the best of research science and technology have enabled a doubling of the rate of genetic gain in two subsequent seed generations. Through these techniques and others to come, we are committed to doubling yields by the year 2030. This ambitious goal is achievable through our commitment to innovation.

The Monsanto plant sciences research organisation, the driving force behind DEKALB performance, is the world’s largest, investing 10% of worldwide turnover into its global R&D effort.

A living library

In some ways the planet has never seemed so small with global markets and global communications commonplace features of our daily lives. But from a genetic standpoint, the world remains very large and diverse as plant species and varieties have adapted to and thrived in local climates and conditions. The global breadth of our germplasm reflects this incredible baseline diversity as well as the decades of selective breeding of high-performance varieties to meet the needs of local farmers.

Our germplasm is a library of important genetic traits that have the potential to boost disease resistance, increase yield and optimize the efficiency of plants. DEKALB selects from the world’s largest germplasm pool, a strategic and genetic advantage for ensuring a steady stream of high-performance crop varieties. Diversity in our germplasm enables excellence in addressing local needs through a wide variety of products.

This diversity is the result of our global exchange program that includes a large testing network comprising two growing cycles within one year. Coupled with today’s most advanced breeding technologies, our global germplasm is a powerful advantage in bringing new, highly competitive products to the market , with confidence in their performance in the field.

Google for DNA

Imagine the world’s largest library without a catalogue of its volumes and subjects. You would have to walk aisle-by-aisle, shelf-by-shelf, pulling down volumes, looking at the contents for the information you need. It would be a time-consuming process to say the least! Today, technology has made possible new ways of working, allowing vast amounts of data to be sifted and searched through powerful search engines. The same is true for breeding and the search engine is Molecular Marker Technology. It allows us to automatically search our global germplasm in order to determine the most beneficial characteristics and traits for farmers around the world.

Molecular Marker Technology enables breeders to recognize desirable traits based on genetic information alone. Think of it as the nano eyes that “read” the plant’s genetic profile. By tagging important genes and remembering their location in the plant genome, we can quickly find and combine the right genes to increase yield and fight crop stress. This has resulted in a rate of genetic gain in DEKALB products that is two to three times higher than conventional breeding methods and this technique is applied within a conventional plant breeding progamme to give the most rapid and consistent improvement bred under traditional guidelines.

DEKALB seeds reflect constant innovation in a number of areas:

• Grain yield

• Grain quality

• Environmental stress tolerance

• Pest control

• Herbicide tolerance

• Disease resistance

• Lipid enhancements (increased oil, improved fatty-acid composition)

• Protein enhancements

• Bioactive compounds

• Better utilization of environmental resources (plant efficiency)

DEKALB products benefit from advanced Molecular Breeding techniques that identify the DNA sequences associated with specific traits. The DNA is contained in the plant's chromosomes which are in turn contained in the nucleus of each plant cell. 

“Molecular photocopying” 

Tissue samples are collected from plants and the DNA extracted. Thermocycling heats the DNA, breaking the bonds, resulting in two separate strands. A primer (an extra portion of genetic material made available) adheres to one end of the broken strand, creating a partial double strand.

A special heat resistant enzyme called TAQ polymerase carries on the work started by the primer, rebuilding a complete double strand along the full length of the segment. The result is a perfect copy of the targeted segment.

The cycle of breaking apart and synthesizing new DNA is repeated for 30 or 40 cycles, over the period of a few hours, exponentially producing more than one billion copies of the original DNA segment.

A molecular marker is a small piece of DNA that can reveal DNA sequence variations between individuals at a particular location on the DNA. To be able to “read” these variations, the targeted DNA strand must first be isolated and amplified (multiplied). This is accomplished through Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), sometimes called “molecular photocopying”.

Interview with Joël Roucolle, Monsanto European Corn Breeding Lead for Mid-maturities

A Breeder’s Perspective

What are the major challenges for breeding today?

With the world population projected to attain 9 billion by mid-century, it is imperative that breeding find ways to multiply yields while using fewer resources, preserving the environment
and producing crops with high nutrition and safety.

What is the impact of technology on the breeder’s job?

Three examples: With Molecular Marker Technology, genetic information that used to take 3 years to understand can now be identified in 30 minutes.

Transgenic technologies are allowing breeders to utilize a larger part of the germplasm by addressing specific vulnerabilities in plants, allowing them to concentrate their efforts on other desirable traits.

Seed chipping is helping to make the breeding process significantly easier by shaving off a small portion of the seed and testing it for desirable genetic traits. If the traits are present, the same seed is selected allowing the breeder to rapidly derive a newer, superior germplasm.

What role does innovation play in DEKALB’s advantage in plant breeding?

 
Innovation allows DEKALB to benefit from better and faster selection processes. Better thanks to genetic markers that enable us to pinpoint and isolate desirable genetic traits; faster thanks to leading facilities including our recombination and conversion centre in Hawaii and our winter breeding stations.

How do you see the role of breeding in the future?

Beyond meeting the needs of a rapidly growing population, the breeder will play a key role in helping farmers increase their yields in spite of the hostile climate conditions that are
facing millions of farmers around the world.

Our global breeding programs capitalize on the global and local dimensions of our entire
breeding organization.