When Helen Booker started her career as a plant scientist, she worked in a tropical paradise, enjoying sunny climates, sandy beaches and warm ocean breezes in Trinidad and Tobago.
Today, when she looks out her office window at the University of Saskatchewan, the palm trees and beaches have been replaced by winter parkas, snow drifts, icy sidewalks and freezing west winds.
“Trinidad and Tobago is a beautiful place , but there are some social problems there,” said Booker, the new flax breeder at the university’s Crop Development Centre in Saskatoon.
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“There’s lots of oil money in Trinidad and Tobago but that doesn’t mean that everything runs smoothly there. I wanted to move back to Canada … and it’s turned out to be a good decision.”
Booker took a circumferential route to the U of S.
She was born in the United Kingdom, raised in Burlington, Ont., and studied plant physiology and molecular biology and genetics at the University of Guelph.
After completing her master’s degree, she moved to Japan where she and her husband taught English.
After that, they moved to Trinidad and Tobago, where Booker started her Ph. D thesis, studying disease resistance in a tropical legume known as bodi or cowpea.
Trinidad and Tobago seems like an unusual place to begin a career in plant breeding, but Booker said the former British colony has a well-established school of agriculture that has attracted outstanding scholars and researchers.
“They have a very old, established school of agriculture. It was initially the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture during the colonial days,” Booker said.
Booker also worked at the International Cacao Research Unit, where a large international gene bank of cacao germplasm is stored.
After returning to Canada in the early 2000s, Booker studied disease resistance in chickpeas at Plant Gene Resources Canada and then took a job as research associate in the wheat breeding program at the University of Alberta.
She arrived at the U of S in 2009.
Since arriving in Saskatoon, Booker has worked closely with Gordon Rowland, the founder of the CDC’s flax breeding program at the Crop Development Centre.
Rowland retired at the end of 2010 and Booker has assumed full responsibility for the flax breeding and genetics program.
The transition from working on cowpeas in Trinidad and Tobago to flax in Western Canada has been a learning process, but the principles are the same.
“Plant breeding is the same everywhere in the world. You use the same basic concepts and … it’s not that different. It’s just a different crop.”
One of her first jobs after arriving at the CDC was to develop a protocol to ensure breeder seed lots in the CDC flax program were free of genetically modified material.
The centre recently deregistered two of its flax varieties – CDC Normandy and CDC Mons – because they contained traces of the GM flax variety Triffid.
To ensure that genetic material from Triffid was not present in other CDC varieties, all lots of CDC breeder seed were grown out and leaf tissue from each plant tested.
Seed from the GM-negative plants was harvested and sent to New Zealand for multiplication.
The same tests were conducted on other CDC lines, including a few new co-op entries and several lines in their first year of co-op testing.
“We’re doing as much as we possibly can to assure that there’s absolutely no contamination in our seed,” Booker said.
“Anything coming into the program is tested and anything coming out of the program is tested.… We’ll also look at testing … the parental lines for our crosses for the past 15 years since Triffid’s development to see if there were any parents that were used that might have been contaminated.”
Booker outlined future breeding priorities.
“We’ll be looking at everything that affects yield,” she said. “There also appears to be an association between high oil content and low yield so it would be nice to break that type of linkage, to develop varieties with high oil content and high yield.”
Booker said the flax program will also focus on developing varieties that could enhance animal and human health.
“I’m also quite interested in the animal and food health side of flax, as well as the industrial usage,” she said.
“We have a number of populations that Gordon Rowland has generated for study so we want to examine the seed traits in those populations, including things like seed colour and other traits and be able to examine the genetics behind those traits.”
