Almost $9 million has been committed to commercializing a DNA-based system for identifying wheat.
The funding was announced last week at the Saskatchewan Research Council in Saskatoon, which will be in charge of the project through its GenServe Laboratories.
While no time frame was announced to complete the commercialization, Canadian Wheat Board chair Larry Hill said the sooner it happens, the better.
“We need it before we have varieties released that we can’t distinguish,” he said after the funding announcement.
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“This is a priority for the grain industry.”
The funding is made up of $4.2 million from Agriculture Canada and $3.2 million from the Saskatchewan government under the AgriFlexibiity fund, along with $740,000 each from the federal and provincial governments under the Western Economic Partnership Agreement.
The wheat board is also contributing $392,000 in partnership with the Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council.
The project’s goal is to develop a cost-effective and consistent form of DNA testing that will identify wheat varieties and classes with a 24-hour turnaround time.
Work on such a system has been underway for years, but took on a new urgency in 2008 when the federal government eliminated kernel visual distinguishability as a requirement for registering new varieties.
Under a licensing agreement with Agriculture Canada, SRC GenServe Laboratories will validate the preliminary scientific work that has been done and refine the test to enable it to differentiate between varieties.
