Western Canada’s king cash crop is the latest plant to have its genome sequenced.
An international team of researchers recently published the canola genome in the journal Science.
“We’ve had access to the sequence for about a year and a half, and it’s already being used by some of the seed companies in their work,” said Isobel Parkin of Agriculture Canada.
As it has in other crops, the sequenced genome is expected to provide a boost to plant breeding programs, speeding up variety development by allowing researchers to look for genetic markers when selecting for and against certain traits.
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“There have been gains in the yield of canola over the last few years. They’re getting smaller every time, but there have been gains,” said Parkin.
“Now we’re trying to target more complicated things.”
Wilf Keller, president of Ag-West Bio, said the genome will help breeders improve traits such as yield, drought, frost tolerance, disease resistance and hybrid vigour once the regions related to the trait are identified.
Breeders already have access to DNA markers for some traits, but the complete genome gives them an expanded tool kit, he added.
“The limited tools you had before were based on a little bit of DNA information from a very specific region. It would be like looking at a map from (Saskatoon) to Yorkton and you’d see the little stretch that takes you through Foam Lake and Wynyard, but you don’t see all the information … every pothole, every hill, every ravine, every slough,” he said.
“You’ll see all of that now, not just the odd spot here or there.”
Parkin highlighted sclerotinia resistance as a problematic trait, one controlled by “a large number of regions of the genome” rather than by a single gene, as is blackleg resistance.
Researchers are also studying shatter resistance but have yet to develop a clear picture about how many genes affect it, she said.
“Marker technology has moved so quickly in the last decade even. It was very labour intensive. It took a long time to get (from) Point A to Point B, but now we can actually look at 60,000 points across the genome within two days and you can do that in hundreds of lines,” she said.
“It’s given us access to tools that we just didn’t have previously.”
Canola contains the genomes of two species: B. oleracea and B. rapa, one the relative of a turnip and the other a cabbage.
For this reason, canola is noted for being more complex than other plants, although not as complicated as wheat, which has yet to be completely sequenced.
Researchers from all of the major canola growing countries collaborated on the canola genome work with Canada, France and China taking the lead.
“Canola is Canada’s game, just like hockey. We should’ve been able to do it first by ourselves, but things don’t always work that way,” said Keller.
