Seeding – and breeding – our future
This week’s show lineup features a glimpse at the world of modern plant breeding through the eyes of Curtis Pozniak, a cereal crop breeder with the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. As well, members of the Grainews team, Kari Belanger and Lee Hart, talk about seed vaults and the people who preserve genetic resources. Hosted by Laura Rance.
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Laura Rance: [00:00:05] The simple act of planting a seed is sometimes referred to as the purest form of wealth creation because one seed turns into many, but nothing about seed is simple. And today on Between the Rows, we’re going to focus on just how complicated and how fascinating seed really is. I’m your host this week, Laura Rance, and I’m going to be offering you a glimpse at a multimedia project, all of us at Glacier Farm Media have been working on over the past year. It’s called Seeding the future. You can find the full project online by following one of the QR codes you’ll see in our publications, or you can go to this link https://gfmdigital.com/seeding-the-future/
But before we get started, here’s a message from our sponsor.
Commercial: [00:01:00] Part of being a farmer is being an accountant and a mechanic and a chemist. You have lots on the go, so Farm Link makes your grain marketing go further. We help you reach your financial goals with calculated sales decisions. No bias, just solutions and results. Plus, with our new app Grain Fox, we bring every opportunity right to your fingertips. Literally start seeing the returns that will get your family ahead. You’ve earned it. Farm Link Your work is worth more. Get started at: farmlinksolutions.ca
Laura Rance: [00:01:34] Welcome back to between the Rows. I’m Laura Rance. Today we’re talking about seed, the stories we’re touching follow how modern crop development work is tied to how well we preserve biodiversity and our genetic resources. And we’ll look at how modern technologies translate, what happens in seed vaults and seed labs into real world solutions for farmers. Let’s start with some observations by Curtis Pozniak, a plant scientist with the University of Saskatchewan focusing on cereal crop development. He spoke with my colleague Karen Briere at the Western Producer about how new tools are changing the plant breeding game.
Pozniak: [00:02:16] So what I’ve seen change the most over the last 20 years is is the precision at which we’re able to select for some traits, using DNA based technologies. Probably the biggest change that we saw in plant breeding efficiency was the development of computers just storing information that that really changed how plant breeders were able to do their work way back. And now we’re seeing one technologies like DNA testing that allow us to get very precise DNA tests for specific traits. For example, for disease resistance or end use quality where the breeder is able to make selections without even doing field testing so that that improves the efficiency of the plant breeding program. So if I think of when I started around that time, double haploid technology was really taking off and in that technology had has the potential to reduce breeding time by a couple of years from when you made the cross to when it’s actually in a farmer’s field. So I think at that time that technology was taking off and DNA marker technology was just starting to evolve. And now the technology we’re seeing is that we have the ability to do rapid DNA sequencing-based tests that where we can actually look at the DNA fingerprints themselves and figure out how we can use that to improve selection efficiency, you know, and then looking forward as more and more genomes are sequenced of the crop kinds that we’re working with and we start understanding what genes are there that paves the way for more precise breeding techniques. So we can we can really hone in on a gene and make sure that it’s there, as well as pave the way for a gene editing technology platform, inbreeding. So I would say in the last 20 years, it’s sort of been around DNA testing capacity. That technology has, you know, really, really changed how we think about plant breeding.
Laura Rance: [00:04:58] Here’s an example of how those tools, like DNA testing, have helped researchers like Pozniak self-critical problems faster than in the past.
Pozniak: [00:05:08] You know, I remember back when I started my breeding program, one of the issues that we were having in Durham was cadmium concentration. And cadmium is a heavy metal that’s found in in prairie soils. And some durum varieties actually have the ability to pull the cadmium from the soil and deposited into the seed. And and there are international standards in terms of the amounts of cadmium that could be in the grain for human consumption. And in some cases we were exceeding that. So we very quickly took on a DNA testing program where we were using a DNA marker to very quickly identify plants that didn’t do that. They were actually low cadmium. They didn’t accumulate it. And and this DNA test was very precise at telling us which ones would accumulate it and we would throw those away and which ones wouldn’t accumulate the cadmium and we would retain those. And so we did that all in the DNA testing lab and could do it very, very quickly, you know, compared to traditional tests where we would have to grow it in the field harvest. The samples do very complex biochemical analysis to to quantify the cadmium levels. But this way we could do it with a simple DNA test and really move quickly. The whole program in a matter of just a couple of years was all low cadmium types.
Laura Rance: [00:06:51] Breeding new crop varieties, however, still takes time. Pozniak said in these times, when the weather appears to be coming more volatile, making the effort to evaluate potential cultivars in a range of field locations and over a number of years is more important than ever. So is the ability to manage vast amounts of data.
Pozniak: [00:07:12] Wheat, for example, has a genome size of 16 billion base pairs, so that’s 16 billion bytes of data just from one variety. So we’re generating a vast amount of data that at least that the genotypic level, but also at the field level where we have to store all the information, analyze it properly and use it to make decisions as well. Looking forward, there’s a lot of lot of interest by some to to use digital phenotyping. So using field drones, you know, drones that are fitted with special cameras that that capture images of the research trials to and to provide information that maybe the human eye can’t see, and that generates massive amounts of data that then has to be meticulously annotated and analyzed so that it can be useful to make decisions so that technology is just starting to evolve. We’re trying to design ways that we can use that information to help in reading decisions. But it’s a vast amount of data and one where special analysis techniques have to be used, where things like artificial intelligence or machine learning approaches, where the computer is, is is itself looking for patterns in data that that could be a signal to a particular phenotype. So I mean, the verdict is out on yet and on on how we might apply that technology to to our selection programs. But certainly the data is is is there and it’s showing to be very powerful.
Laura Rance: [00:09:33] Equally important is access to a diverse range of heritage and wild relatives of target crops.
Pozniak: [00:09:40] I’m leading a couple of projects now that are looking at the value of heritage varieties and even further back all the way back to wild relatives of the species that’s now cultivated. Most of the crops that we grow were domesticated, so they grow in the wild in certain parts of the world, and those collections have been for a number of crops, have been carefully curated and put into gene banks, where then we can access them and evaluate them for various traits to see if they if they can contribute something useful to a new variety. You know, just as an example in in durum wheat, which is what I work on, one of the one of the big problems that we have is is Fusarium head blight which is a disease of wheat, and durum is extremely sensitive to that particular disease and it’s hard to find genetic resistance. There is resistance there, but the resistance is very complex. And so what we have been doing is going back to the wild relatives and screening them specifically for Fusarium head blight resistance and identifying those that have really good resistance a lot better than we have in our commercial varieties and then crossing them with the new commercial varieties to develop varieties that that yield well and have good quality. I think in the case of wheat, there’s well over five hundred thousand accensions that have been curated around the world. So there’s there are tremendous efforts in most of the crop kinds that we work with to maintain the wild species, heritage varieties and land races. All of those things in the event that that we need to go back to to get access to some genes that would be useful in the future.
Laura Rance: [00:12:02] But how could researchers like Paul Pozniak be assured they will be able to find the genetic resources they need? It’s been well documented that biodiversity is declining in the natural environment. That’s where seed vaults come in. The most famous one is the underground vault that Svalbarg Norway, also known as the Doomsday Vault. But there are about 1,700 banks all over the world, including here in Canada. Several of my colleagues working on the Seeding the Future project explored how seed banks operate, the challenges they face and the people who do this kind of work. The stories they came back with are rich with history, futuristic predictions, political intrigue, scientific conundrums and even tragedy. Joining me now are two members of the Grainews Team editor Kari Belanger and field editor Lee Hart to talk about what they learned. Hi Lee and hi, Carrie. Thanks for joining us today.
Lee Hart: [00:13:04] Well, thanks. Good to be here.
Laura Rance: [00:13:06] So, Lee, tell me a little bit about what you learned about Canada’s seed vault.
Lee Hart: [00:13:13] Well, I think, first of all, I learned quite a bit in the sense that the first thing I learned was that there is one and, you know, it was one of those, I guess, is one of those things that, you know, over the years of writing about crops and new varieties and so forth. I just never really gave much thought to, you know, where the, you know, when, when varieties are deregistered or whatever, or where this plant material actually comes from or is stored and that sort of thing. So, you know, I guess I just thought, you know, every researcher had like, you know, a pantry or whatever in their lab that they went and grabbed something from. But anyway, so when we when I first got looking into this, it was just interesting to know that there you know, there is a seed bank, the seed vault, which they call the Plant Genetic Resources of Canada facility and it originated in Ottawa, started 50 years ago and and then moved to Saskatoon in 1998. So. So it was just, you know, to learn it was there. And it’s also part of a global network. There’s twelve hundred or fifteen hundred of these similar facilities around the world with a main source in main vault in Europe. But yeah, and then just as I talked to the the curator there, Axel Diedrichsen, it was just, you know, there it’s a very, you know, they’ve got a lot of material. Yeah. So it was that was, I guess it was a real eye opener for me.
Laura Rance: [00:14:55] How many like how many seed types or varieties does it hold?
Speaker5: [00:15:00] Well, the the facility in Saskatoon, because they’re dealing with field crops there. There are a couple of other things. There’s a vegetable one in Harrow Ontario and potato one in on the East Coast. So the one in Saskatoon deals with the Canadian field crops. And so, yeah, they deal with they have like a thousand something like a thousand different crop varieties that they that they have material for. And the collection includes about 200,000 seed samples of both cultivated and wild species that are in storage. And now not to overwhelm everybody with details here, but they have about 115,000 cereal seed samples, about 40,000 barley samples, 28,000 and 13,000 wheat samples. And and then there are other samples include canola and flax and forage seeds and grasses. So, yeah, so it’s a very comprehensive collection.
Laura Rance: [00:16:13] How do they keep these seeds alive, so to speak? I mean, we think of it as a vault and it just goes in there, but they actually go to some effort to make sure these seeds are viable, don’t they?
Lee Hart: [00:16:23] Yeah, they do. They have, you know, I mean, they have to. At the facility in Saskatoon, there are two main rooms or vaults, I guess you’d call them that they’re just dedicated to holding seeds, you know, seed envelopes and and other, I guess, other genetic material. Now the one vault, these vaults are 10 meters by eight meters and in in with the ceilings of two point five meters high. And it’s sort of like just racks from floor to ceiling in there of bins that hold envelopes of seed samples and and the one vault is keeps things stored at 4 C and the other vault is much lower and it’s minus 20 degrees centigrade. So depending on it’s sort of a, I guess, a duplication in some respects, the cooler one. I showed how to refer that to the warmest one, which is 4 C. That’s sort of the working supply, I guess, whatever of seeds that they have there. And you know, they’ll last for several years, even at 4C. But you know, it’s the one that if they need samples and needed a seed sample tomorrow, they would they would go and take it from there.
Lee Hart: [00:17:54] The other vault, which is minus 20, that’s where, you know, a duplicate package. It’s in different packaging and so forth long term. So I mean that at that temperature minus 20, the seeds will probably remain viable, they estimate for 100 to 150 years, so. So every batch of seed that comes in that they want to keep in the in the seed vault, there’s one envelope of seed they’ll put in the in the four four degree centigrade vault. And then they’ll also put another sample in the long term storage, which is the 20 minus 20 degree centigrade. So. So they’re always, you know, I guess they’re it’s obviously temperature controlled and and then environmentally controlled and so forth. And they do check them every so often, like the particularly the 4 C, the cooler, warmer room, I guess, to make sure the seeds are viable and so forth. And yeah, and as and as any seed as seed is taken out and sent to a researcher someplace, then they do replace it because on the farm at Saskatoon, they they just grow, grow new ones. So and then they replace the supply.
Laura Rance: [00:19:16] So Kari, just turning over to you, you decided to focus on on some interesting characters, both in current times and in the past. What what drew you to the people side of this story?
Kari Belanger: [00:19:29] Right. Well, as as Lee has outlined here, the vault, what is completely interesting, however, as soon as I started talking to Axel, who is he’s a research scientist and he’s the curator of the PGRC. His passion and commitment to preserving the diversity of cultivated plants was apparent from about his first sentences. And actually his next couple of sentences blew my mind. And you know, I’ve been writing about seed for years. I’ve been, you know, covering crop production for years, and what he told his context was so different from anything that I had thought of before. I won’t think about cultivated plants in the same way, and what he said to me was he believes that the observation of cultivated plants and their diversity is as important to understanding our human history as archaeological artifacts or written records. So for me, that was mind blown. And after that, we sort of we started talking about his background and I thought, Whoa, this, this is unbelievable. His background is set against a backdrop of social and political upheaval. It’s international. I mean, he’s he’s studied in several countries besides his his home, which was Germany. He’s just completely fascinating. He’s sort of a seed saver on an international level and has been for most of his life.
Kari Belanger: [00:21:32] He also, though at the heart of everything, is his burning desire to answer large philosophical questions sort of in his role, as well as curator for him, philosophy and science go hand in hand. There’s no separation. So for me, I you know, we talked on the phone for an hour and a half and what a great story he has. And for example, I just I just want to pick out one example, but there are so many interesting things about this man. So Diedrichsen said he joined the German gene bank in the early 1990s. So this was after the shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which for many of us was a pretty pivotal moment. I mean, I remember what exactly what I was doing that time that we all saw those images of the fall of the Berlin Wall. So he was there at the German gene bank at a time of incredible social, political and economic upheaval. The gene bank was located in what was formerly known as East Germany. So at that time, Soviet power was waning. There was a collapse of communist regimes, and because of this change in eastern European countries, there was such concern about crop plant diversity, loss and seed preservation.
Kari Belanger: [00:23:04] So because he was part of the German gene bank, he was actually on the front line of saving and protecting diversity right there. And what he what he had to say about that was also very interesting. And if you’ll just let me, maybe I could just read a bit about what he thought of that time. And that was so. He says it was the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, and the German gene bank was located in the eastern part of Germany. It was a time of big changes and many new possibilities. He said they had very interesting interactions with non-governmental organizations that were interested in preserving diversity, but these eastern European countries were undergoing big changes. And for example, in Poland, they had a very small, structured agriculture that was loaded with diversity of crop plants that was being very challenged. So he says they had many interactions with the people who took an interest in in the gene bank and actively participated in research projects and collecting missions to ensure that diversity would be preserved. That’s just one little snippet of his very interesting life, so I was so very happy to get the chance. To to meet Axel and and sort of understand what drives him.
Laura Rance: [00:24:34] Kari, it’s clear that the passion for this cause goes with the territory. Tell us a little bit about Nikolai Vavilov Vavilov.
Kari Belanger: [00:24:43] Well, Nikolai Vavilov was a very important and influential Russian botanist and geneticist who worked in the early 1900s. He like to put this into context that unlike was was like a rock star in Russian and international agricultural science. What drove him was his passion to feed the people of Russia. So he was the director of very important agricultural research institutes. He was very important in the world of genetics as well. In fact, he established more than 400 research institutes and experiment stations throw the Soviet Union. So he was known throughout the world and he was a truly celebrated Russian scientist. Now you would think that, you know, with his all of his successes and his contributions to agriculture and his country would assure him his place for years to come. But this would not be the case, despite world renown. He fell out of favor with the Stalin regime because of politics. And as a result, he was imprisoned in 1941. And so this this man who had dedicated his life to feeding the people of Russia, he actually ended up starving to death in a Russian prison in 1943.
Laura Rance: [00:26:23] Wow, that’s fascinating. Tragic, but fascinating. Well, thanks to both of you for joining me today.
Kari Belanger: [00:26:31] You’re welcome, my pleasure.
Laura Rance: [00:26:44] I was speaking with Lee Hart and Kari Belanger, who both write for Grainews. They were part of the Glacier Farm media team that worked on the Seeding the Future project. You can find their stories and more by going to: https://gfmdigital.com/seeding-the-future/
Or by following the QR codes you will find in our publications. You can also find more details about these stories on YouTube. Just search for Between the Rows podcast. Thanks for joining us this week. We’ll be back. I hope you’ll join us. I’m Laura Rance.
Commercial: [00:27:33] Part of being a farmer is being an accountant and a mechanic and a chemist. You have lots on the go, so farm link, make sure grain marketing go further. We help you reach your financial goals with calculated sales decisions. No bias, just solutions and results. Plus, with our new app Grain Fox, we bring every opportunity right to your fingertips. Literally start seeing the returns that’ll get your family ahead. You’ve earned it Farm Link. Your work is worth more. Get started at: farmlinksolutions.ca.
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