Behind the inscrutable face of an anonymous building at the University of Manitoba, an agricultural technological revolution is continuing to sweep away the remnants of the old plant breeding system.
The system being scrapped created most of the crop varieties farmers have grown, including the rust resistant wheat varieties developed in this building at the U of M, which used to be Agriculture Canada’s Dominion Rust Laboratory.
But the system was slow and tedious, forcing plant breeders to spend years manually breeding and sorting large numbers of seedlings and plants in what researchers now call a “shotgun” approach.
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In new labs across the country, public and private researchers are replacing menial labour with robots, large-scale tests with small and tightly focused tests, and informed but inexact observations with scientifically verifiable hard data.
Here in what is now called the Monsanto Crop Technology Centre, new canola varieties are created and brought to market in less than four years, compared to the seven-year average for traditional breeding.
“The timeframe to produce the seed has been significantly reduced because of the biotechnology we have,” said Kurt Wickstrom, Monsanto Canada’s canola product manager.
The company can also test more varieties and research more possibilities with fewer staff than were needed in the traditional system.
“The combination of the processes and the equipment that’s now available really cuts the time down and really allows you to be much more efficient and operate on a larger scale,” said Norm Sissons, Monsanto’s manager of technology for seed development.
“It’s much less labour intensive than it was.”
By using double-haploid breeding, researchers here and in other high-tech crop development labs are able to cut many steps out of the process of creating pure variety seeds.
And by using DNA fingerprinting, plants can be quickly and easily tested, allowing scientists to find what they are looking for and discard whatever doesn’t contain it.
Researchers inside the building are happy to see this revolution end many of the tedious tasks that traditionally forced scientists to do a lot of donkey work.
When researcher Kelly Anderson puts a 96-well container onto a new laboratory robot for it to fill with leaf samples, she remembers the recent past, when scientists would have to fill each of the 96 holes by hand. Container after container was filled that way.
“It drove you crazy,” said Anderson, who now can spend most of her time analyzing results rather than doing the grunt work.
At the moment, Monsanto is focusing on high-yielding hybrid canolas resistant to glyphosate.
The breeding program has produced the long-term blockbuster 33-55 variety and earlier this year released 35-85, a long-season canola variety.
This fall Monsanto plans to release Roundup Ready 33-95 and the hybrid X498 (its commercial name has not yet been selected), both products of this centre.
Researchers here are excited about their work, but the company isn’t drawing attention to itself.
There is no sign on the building and no indication of Monsanto’s presence at the university.
That’s deliberate, because Monsanto knows the science it is excited about is disliked by some.
“With the attention Monsanto gets as it is, we probably don’t want to attract a lot of attention there,” Sissons said.
“We also want to look out for our employees too, that they don’t have to deal with things like that on a daily basis, with harassment from people or things like that.”
