If Isobel Parkin had her way, a June frost might still make weekend camping miserable but wouldn’t wipe out newly seeded canola.
The Saskatoon-based Agriculture Canada research scientist is blazing several paths in pursuit of a way to make canola more tolerant of the sort of freezing temperatures that were such a headache for farmers this spring.
One avenue of exploration leads to the planet’s frozen poles. Canola is a member of the crucifer family, which is diverse in many ways, including geographic distribution.
“Some live in the Antarctic and some live in the Arctic, so we are pulling in some of these species from the Antarctic and Arctic, the ones that have a really high level of tolerance to these stresses, and looking at them,” Parkin said.
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“Which gene are they favouring to give this resilience?”
Parkin, who also helps steer the international effort to sequence and map the canola genome, has access to polar crucifers without leaving the building because Agriculture Canada’s Plant Gene Resource Centre stores seeds of a host of crucifers and other plants from around the world.
Similar institutions in other countries also make seed available to researchers.
By looking at how other plants tolerate frost stress, Parkin hopes to learn how to give it to canola.
“It’s quite complicated because it is similar to how we (humans) respond to disease. We have lots of immune responses,” she said.
“Plants respond to stress in a very complex fashion. They change almost every level of their metabolism.”
Parkin said another canola cousin worthy of investigation is Brassica carinata, or Ethiopian mustard.
“Carinata in the field is high yielding, yet is far more frost tolerant and drought tolerant. So we would like to capture that and move it into canola.”
However, the most concrete results so far have come from screening for frost tolerant lines of arabidopsis, a crucifer commonly used by researchers because it is simple, small and fast growing. Its genome was sequenced in 2000.
Of the 50,000 lines screened, three had superior frost tolerance 2 to 3 C better than the norm. Parkin is trying to identify the genetic source.
“We believe it is a single gene,” she said. “We feel that if we can pull that gene out of arabidopsis, then we can go to canola and find the equivalent one and potentially have the same effect in canola.”
Parkin is encouraged by the progress, but it will take years to confirm the identity of the gene and whether it has a match in canola.
