A high-protein parent and two high-tech tools have pushed a promising new line of Canada prairie spring wheat into its third year of co-op field tests.
Wheat breeder Gavin Hum-phreys hopes a line known as HY639 will eventually become a variety in farmers’ fields.
The CPS line has so far, on average, tested 1.5 percent higher for protein compared to standard CPS varieties: a “dramatic” increase, said Humphreys, who works at Agriculture Canada’s cereal research centre.
So far, the new line has shown intermediate yields, comparative to the Oslo variety. If the line performs well in fields this summer, it may be put forward for registration in 2000.
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But even if this new line doesn’t work out for farmers, Humphreys said it is significant in the field of wheat breeding.
The line is somewhat of a poster child for the power of the relatively new tools of marker-assisted selection and double haploidy in wheats.
Humphreys believes it’s the first time the tools have been used together. And he’s encouraged by the results. Normally, it takes five years for a line to get into the testing system, then another five years to make it through the co-op tests.
Humphreys and a large team of researchers at the Winnipeg centre shaved four years off the total.
Farmers can expect to see more varieties come through the system faster using these tools in the future, said Humphreys.
The project was started in 1995 by Neil Howes, a wheat breeder who has since moved back to his native Australia.
Howes got a $90,000 grant from the farmer-funded Western Grains Research Foundation to try to transfer a high-protein gene into several classes of wheat.
Howes was using a gene from a United States variety called Glupro. The wheat has tall, weak straw, but very high protein.
The gene is unique because it doesn’t seem to reduce yield. Usually high-protein wheat is lower-yielding.
Howes had found a marker for the gene. With a chemical test, the researchers could tell if the gene was present in a plant.
It was a restriction fragment length polymorphism marker, which requires radioactive phosphorus. Humphreys converted the RFLP marker into one that was easier and faster for breeders to work with.
He changed it to a polymerase chain reaction marker. Now, a chemical test showed whether the gene was present in two days, rather than two weeks.
Howes crossed the Glupro line with Minto and Pasqua so the researchers would have germplasm high in protein, but better adapted to western Canadian conditions.
Then, the team took a short-cut around the heredity process, removing variability, using double haploids.
They grew plants they knew were high in protein, but removed the anthers from the flower and added corn pollen.
This caused the wheat embryo to grow with only half its normal chromosomes. Researchers rescued the embryos from the flowers and put the tiny green specks onto a plate with nutrients to help it grow.
Once the plant was able to grow in soil, the team treated it with a chemical called colchicine, making a carbon copy of its half-set of chromosomes.
They harvested seeds from the doubled-haploid plant. In six months, researchers were able to produce what would normally require 10 generations of in-breeding plants.
More efficient
Today, researchers at the centre produce more than 200 doubled haploids each week. Before they got their system down pat, they produced less than 200 per month, said Humphreys.
The researchers focused on getting high protein into CPS wheats because the class is “notoriously low in protein,” explained Humphreys.
“We felt the gene would likely be more useful in that class.”
He is also using the gene and marker in breeding a higher-protein extra strong wheat.
So far, quality results are promising, said Humphreys.
