marker-assisted selection in wheat - ictsd

Chapter 18 – Marker-assisted selection in crop and livestock improvement 373the agricultural research agenda expands,organizations must be able to respond to anincreasingly diverse and complex portfolioof priorities by strengthening interactionswithin the system and developing linksand partnerships with groups traditionallyoutside the system. Towards this end, theCGIAR has designed a strategy to nurturethe definition of objective R&D agendasin key themes and to guide scientists andteams worldwide towards integrated, synergisticinvolvement and operation. Thisstrategy became known as the “GlobalChallenge Programmes” (www.cgiar.org/impact/challenge/index.html).The strategy of the Global ChallengeProgrammes recognizes both that the costof conducting research is escalating andthat the complexity of the science neededfor agricultural research is increasing.Research in most fields requires not onlyspecialized equipment and facilities butalso highly trained technical support indiverse disciplines. Increasingly, multidisciplinaryteams of scientists will be requiredto address the complex issues facing agricultureand, in many cases, the professionalexpertise needed may have to be accessed indifferent parts of the world.One such Challenge Programme, entitled“Unlocking Genetic Diversity in Cropsfor the Resource-Poor”, also known as the“Generation Challenge Programme (GCP)”(CGIAR, 2003) is an international, multiinstitutional,cross-disciplinary publicplatform for accessing and developing newgenetic resources using advanced moleculartechnologies associated with conventionalmethods. Founded in July 2003 by theExecutive Council of the CGIAR withstart-up funding from the World Bank andthe European Commission, the GCP has amembership of twenty-two public researchinstitutions around the world, includingnine CGIAR centres, four advancedresearch institutes and nine national agriculturalresearch system institutions. Itsbudget in 2005 totalled at US$14 million(GCP, 2005).This platform was designed to ensurethat the advances of crop science and technologyare applied to the specific problemsand needs of resource-poor people whorely on agriculture for subsistence and theirlivelihoods. The GCP aims to “bridge thatgap by using advances in molecular biologyand harnessing the rich global stocks ofcrop genetic resources to create and providea new generation of plants that meetthese farmers’ needs”.The concrete objective of the GCP isto access and develop genomic and geneticresources as enabling technologies andintermediate products for crop improvementprogrammes. It will not produce andrelease finished crop varieties for farmers,but develop new genetic resources andmake the initial gene transfers to locallyadapted germplasm, and then transfer thederived materials to crop improvementprogrammes, particularly those conductedin national agricultural research systemsof developing countries, and to any otherentities that have crop improvement goals,especially those dedicated to resource-poorfarmers.The GCP is, to date, the most comprehensiveeffort to cover, in a well structuredand feasible manner, the complex interactionsbetween genetic resources, genomicsand breeding (Figure 2) in order to capturethe benefits of the revolutions in biologyand direct them to help solve some ofthe agricultural problems in the world’smost difficult and marginal environments.It addresses its three key component partsin a separate but interconnected manner:(1) genetic resource collections provide the