The federal agriculture department has offered Canada’s battered flax industry $5.9 million to develop new flax varieties and create an improved DNA testing system to detect GM contamination.
Federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz said $4 million will be used to develop new, nongenetically modified, herbicide-tolerant flax varieties.
They will be developed using a technology known as the Rapid Trait Development System (RTDS), a mutagenesis technique.
The other $1.9 million will be used to develop a complete DNA map of CDC Triffid, the genetically modified flax variety that has disrupted Canadian flax exports to Europe.
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By developing a more complete DNA picture of Triffid, the flax industry will be able to better detect the presence of GM material, Ritz said.
“The results of those tests will be used to assure global flax markets that Canada knows its crop and is in control … of the quality of all flax delivered,” he said.
Flax Council of Canada president Barry Hall said the new testing system is key to restoring confidence in Canadian flax supplies.
It will be able to identify Triffid as the specific GM event in a contaminated flax sample.
Hall said current tests look at a small portion of flax DNA to detect whether genetic modification has taken place.
However, they are unable to identify Triffid as the specific type responsible for the contamination.
“What we need to develop is a full mapping of Triffid and to identify what (GM) events are actually occurring. We also need to improve on the accuracy and speed at which those tests can be done and also lower the costs,” Hall said.
The development of new flax varieties using RTDS technology is also an important step in ensuring that Canadian growers have access to new nonGM varieties with improved agronomic traits and better end-use characteristics.
Hall said RTDS technology does not involve the transfer of foreign genes into flax. Therefore, the new varieties should be accepted by foreign flax buyers.
Hall said traditional mutagenesis techniques use chemicals and radiation to cause genetic mutations in an undefined portion of a plant’s genome.
RTDS uses a different process to produce genetic mutations. That process targets a small, defined part of the genome, allowing plant breeders to make more precise genetic alterations.
“It’s very targeted,” Hall said.
“Unlike traditional mutagenesis, it’s not a shotgun approach at all.”
Hall said the new flax breeding initiative is closely related to the Total Utilization Flax Genomics project, which aims to sequence the entire flax genome for breeding purposes.
Cibus will be bringing RTDS to Canadian flax breeding as the latest in a string of deals involving RTDS crops.
Late last year, the company reached an agreement with Brett Young Seeds, allowing Brett Young to distribute RTDS crops in Western Canada and the northern plains of the United States.
Cibus officials say the company’s first herbicide tolerant RTDS canola variety could be available in the U.S. by 2011 and in Canada by 2013.
