The exchange of international germplasm has been crucial for Canada’s barley breeding program, says the head of research at Alberta Agriculture’s Field Crop Development Centre at Lacombe.
About half of all breeding progress in barley in Western Canada comes from shared genetic material from international sources, said Jim Helm, a barley breeder for 44 years who has seen 29 barley varieties and nine triticale varieties come out of the Canadian program thanks to this form of co-operation.
“I suggest we are entering an era of emphasis on germplasm, and particularly as companies are getting into plant breeding areas in some of the other crops, germplasm is harder to access for public breeders, yet they seem to be accessing ours,” he said at the Canadian Barley Symposium.
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Much of the barley germplasm was stored in Syria at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which is part of an international network preserving plant genetics.
The seed banks have been used to obtain genetic material to develop disease and pest resistance in crops as well as other improvements.
Canada has developed more lines from the ICARDA germplasm program than any other country in the world, said Helm.
This material has been the source of multi-disease resistance against scald, net blotch, stripe rust, fusarium head blight, smuts, root rot and spot blotch.
It is also used to develop crops tolerant against drought, heat, salinity, water logging and winter hardiness.
This means testing thousands of lines for disease resistance at sites around the world.
A breakthrough came when scientists working with germplasm found a plant may be resistant to one disease but susceptible to another.
“We have broken that linkage and we now have lines that have yellow dwarf resistance and stripe rust resistance,” he said.
Researchers checked to see where the germplasm came from and found the Canadian-developed Seebe variety appears to be a source of multiple disease resistance. It is a two-row feed barley selected for scald resistance, but it is also resistant to fusarium head blight and stripe rust.
“There is something happening in that variety, and I wish I knew what it was,” Helm said.
