Full Version - Water for Food Institute - University of Nebraska

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GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON WATER FOR FOOD 2
Speakers
Atlin said, it is unlikely that transgenes or
quantitative trait loci would have delivered
similar gains without breeding advancements.
The new biotechnology tools are adding onto
a solid foundation of cultivar development.
“We’re very concerned that the new tools that
are becoming available be applied in breeding
programs targeted at the poorest farmers
in rainfed situations,” Atlin said. CIMMYT
is sourcing and applying tools, such as
improved screening approaches and
phenotyping protocols, double-haploid
inducers, molecular-marker technologies
and breeding informatics management.
Transgenic Future
CIMMYT also is involved in public-private
partnerships to develop transgenes for improving
drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency for
African smallholders through the Water-Efficient
Maize for Africa project with Monsanto Company
and the Improved Maize for African Soils project
with Pioneer. The products of these collaborations
will be drought-tolerant and improved nitrogenuse
transgenic varieties available to African
smallholders under humanitarian licensing
and market segmentation arrangements.
Deployment of transgenics in developing countries
requires $25 million to $100 million and at least
12 years to make it to a farmer’s field, Atlin
said. Few African countries have a regulatory
framework allowing them to accept transgenic
technology, and those that do rely on data from
the U.S. regulatory system. “At the moment,
and I believe for the foreseeable future, only
transgenes that can be commercialized by a
company for farmers in a developed country
will be made available in developing countries.”
A transgene beneficial in Africa, but detrimental
to U.S. yields, most likely will not be developed
for marketing.
Drought tolerance in maize appears to be affected
by many genetic factors, for which marker-index
selection approaches are more suited. Fortunately,
reduced costs for genotyping technologies are
starting to allow CIMMYT and small breeding
programs to apply these technologies. Nextgeneration
sequencing of genome representations
will make the haplotype, rather than the line,
the selection unit, which will allow programs
to share information but not germplasm. That
ability, along with other advances Atlin described,
will encourage the development of “open-source”
breeding, which could reduce breeding cycle times
by fivefold and potentially double genetic gains.
Making breeding informatics accessible to
smaller breeding programs will be critical to the
success of the new breeding system. “There’s a
wave of genotypic data that’s going to break
over us in the next year or so,” Atlin said. “This
is not the distant future. This is happening. We
will have thousands of polymorphisms available
to use in making selections within the next year
to 18 months. We need to put the systems in place
to allow us to surf this wave of information.”
Constraints
Logistical constraints remain. Seed is expensive
and difficult to produce, and many small
companies in Africa cannot produce needed
quantities, creating a serious logistical problem
getting hybrid seeds to farmers. CIMMYT