A botched procedure at an Edmonton research facility could result in big savings on input costs for canola farmers.
Last month Monsanto announced it had entered into a partnership with Arcadia Biosciences to commercialize a line of genetically modified canola that uses as little as one-third of the nitrogen fertilizer as conventional varieties.
Arcadia is an American biotechnology firm based out of Davis, California. But the discovery had its roots in Canada where crop researchers at the University of Alberta were attempting to develop a line of canola with salinity tolerance.
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As is the case with many scientific revelations there was a little blind luck involved in the breakthrough. An oversight led to an unexpected result when a research assistant forgot to apply fertilizer during one of the greenhouse trials.
The team discovered that while the control plants in that trial fared poorly, the GM canola was growing more or less normally, said Eric Rey, president of Arcadia Biosciences.
“They looked into it a little bit more and figured out they had essentially come up with a way to create plants that are much more efficient users of nitrogen.”
Arcadia refined the technology and has entered into a business relationship with Monsanto to commercialize the new line of canola over the next six to eight years.
Unlike some earlier GM crops, no foreign genes were introduced to the canola. Instead, the company used a promoter to encourage a gene that already exists in plants to work harder.
Rey said it’s akin to fiddling with a dimmer switch on the living room wall.
“We’ve basically turned it up.”
Employing another analogy to describe how the technology works, he said plants suck up nitrogen from the soil like humans slurp milk shakes through a straw, only they’re not good at it, often consuming less than half of the fertilizer applied to a field.
“What we’ve done really is we’ve made them suck harder, which is perhaps a poor choice of term, but that’s what we’ve done.”
The nitrogen use efficiency gene is one of a series of recently announced biotech developments for canola. The oilseed has also been successfully transformed with yield-enhancement and drought-tolerance genes, a few of the next generation of GM traits.
Rey said the advancements are the direct byproduct of the rapid acceleration in biotechnology that happened in the late 1990s.
Canola is on the frontier of the next wave of genetic modification because it is closely related to Arabidopsis, a weedy plant with a short life cycle that biotech researchers use as a testing platform for much of their work.
“Arabidopsis is sort of the laboratory rat of the plant world, if you will,” said Rey.
It is easily transformed, turns over generations quickly and has been thoroughly sequenced.
Because of its close ties to Arabidopsis, canola gives researchers “an easy second step” from the test world to the real world of farming, which is why many of the new wave of biotech traits will first appear in canola, a crop grown extensively in Western Canada.
But that doesn’t mean the oilseed will be the exclusive domain of novel traits. Arcadia has already successfully transformed tobacco and rice with the nitrogen use efficiency gene and is working on wheat, corn and cotton.
