Breeding for life. How perennial crops keep the soil in place, increase fertility and sequester...
Transcript of Breeding for life. How perennial crops keep the soil in place, increase fertility and sequester...
Breeding for Life
Domestication of perennial cropsthrough modern plant breeding
Sten StymneDepartment of Plant Breeding
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Winter crops reduce leakage, increase carbon in the soil, improve water and nutrient use efficiency and increase yield.
Biannual tap root crops like sugar beet cannot be planted as winter crops
Winter
SummerGenetic engineer can produce hybrid sugar beat that does not flower upon vernalisation allowing the fields to be covered by sugar beet plants during winter and improve beet yield with 25%.
Biannual tap root crops like sugar beet cannot be planted as winter crops
Winter
SummerGenetic engineering can produce hybrid sugar beet that does not flower upon vernalisation allowing the fields to be covered by sugar beet plants during winter and improve beet yield with >25%.
Biannual tap root crops like sugar beet cannot be planted as winter crops
Winter
SummerGenetic engineer can produce hybrid sugar beat that does not flower upon vernalisation allowing the fields to be covered by sugar beet plants during winter and improve beet yield with 25%.
Black death pandemic
The invasion of perennial plants in abandoned agricultural land after the Black Death might have caused a decrease in CO2 levels that lead to the ’Little Ice Age’
Winter wheat och perenníal wheatgrass (Thinopyrum intermedium )
If all agricultural land was planted with perennial crops it is calculated that athmospheric CO2 levels will decrease to pre-industrial levels!
Nearly only annual plants have been domesticated for agriculture during the 10 000 years ofplant domestication.
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Of several reasons it was much easier to domesticate annual herbs than perennial.
Also, no perennial herbs have the same massive seed setting as the annuals.
Modern plant breeding can uncouple the negative correlation between perenniality and seed yield
The rapid advancement of plant science and modern plant breeding methods offer opportunity to develop perennial agricultural crops in a reasonable time frame.
Two approaches:
1. Introduce perenniality in annual crops by introduction of genes from wild relatives.
2. Domesticate a wild perennial plant to an agriculture crop.
Only the Swedish domestication program pursue this. However it might have an advantage since these plants have been evolved as perennials over million of years.
(Lepidium campestre)• Good agronomic stature• Very cold hardy (overwinter even in most nortern part of Sweden)
• High seed yield (5 ton/ha)• Biannual
Domestication of Lepidium campestre toan oil crop
Late Prof. Arnulf Merker
We are now domesticating Lepidium to a biannual and perennial oil crop using modern plant breeding methods.
Gene technology: Genetic simple traits that we know how to introduce by genetic engineering.
Cross breeding: Complex traits and traits encoded by unidentified genes
Domestication with genetic engineering:
Professor Li-Hua Zhu Ph.D. student Emelie Ivarson
Development of an efficient transformation protocol
The Lepidium seed oil has a quality that is not good for anything
Oleic acid
Linolen
ic ac
idEr
ucic a
cid
Oleic acid
Linolen
ic ac
id
Wild type oil GM oil
The GM seed oil is an excellent frying oil
Fatty acid composition of wild type Lepidium Fatty acid composition of GM Lepidium
Series10
102030405060708090
%
Oil content low (20%) in Lepidium seedsand little genetic variation.
Increased to 23% (17% increase) with gene technology.Target: 30% (will then give the same yield as winter rape per ha)
We use the latest genomic tools in cross breeding of Lepidium:
• Better establishment of seedlings
• Perenniality
Major traits to be introduced:Dr. Mulatu Geleta
2 0 2 3 - 0 4 - 1 4
261st round growth
2nd round growth
F1 generation
L. campestre-heterophyllum hybrid
170 Billion US dollars
Manhattan project 26 billion dollars Apollo project
Perennial crop projects globally0,00001 billion dollars
Save Our SoilSave Our Planet
In Sweden organic farming recieve 600M SEK/year in extra subsidies, a cultivationsystem that decrease carbon in the soil.
Research in developing perennial crops recieve 3M SEK /year