New research funded by the [foundationfar.org]Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research’s (FFAR) Growing Impact Award could help plant breeders and farmers respond more rapidly to food production needs.
FFAR and matching funders Iowa State University (ISU), KeyGene, KWS and RAGT are providing a combined investment of $960,107 to ISU researchers to improve doubled haploid technology, a crop breeding method that speeds up the development of new crop varieties.
Shortening the timeline to breed new crop varieties helps plant breeders deliver crops with the traits farmers need, including higher yield, disease resistance and better performance during drought or flooding. One time-consuming step in plant breeding is producing stable breeding lines to develop new varieties. Doubled haploid technology can produce these lines in just two generations instead of the six to eight generations required with traditional methods.
“Helping farmers succeed in the face of new and increased obstacles to production requires giving plant breeders better tools to build the crops that can handle those challenges,” said Dr. Kathy Munkvold, FFAR scientific program director. “This research is helping plant breeders move useful traits from the lab to the farm more quickly.”
With the Growing Impact Award, Dr. Thomas Lübberstedt, professor and K.J. Frey Chair in Agronomy at ISU, and his research team are building on his 2020 FFAR Seeding Solutions grant, which identified genes involved in haploid plant fertility. Most crops have two sets of chromosomes, but breeders can produce haploid plants with only one set. Though haploids can help breeders create genetically uniform breeding material faster than conventional methods, they usually cannot reproduce. To restore fertility, breeders often use costly, time-consuming chemical treatments that double the plants’ chromosomes. Breeders then use the resulting plants to develop hybrid crops with desired traits.
Lübberstedt’s earlier research identified genes that affect haploid fertility and showed that altering some of them could allow haploid plants to reproduce. With the new grant, Lübberstedt’s team will test whether those genes can help haploid plants naturally double their chromosomes, reducing the need for chemical treatments. Using corn, the researchers aim to produce stable inbred lines in two generations without the need for seedling treatment and transplanting. This approach would simplify doubled haploid breeding and make it more widely available, delivering improved crop lines more quickly. Because genes involved in haploid fertility are shared across plant species, results from corn could also inform similar breeding approaches in other crops.
“While I expect rapid benefits of this FFAR project with regard to methods for doubled haploid line development, I also foresee longer-term research opportunities to enable novel breeding schemes based on fertile haploid plants,” said Lübberstedt. “This is another major innovation of this project.”
Read more about breakthrough results from the 2020 Seeding Solutions grant.
Dr. Sherret Chase developed doubled haploid technology while on the ISU faculty from 1947-1953. His work helped establish an approach that is now widely used in maize breeding. After decades of further development, today millions of doubled haploid lines are produced in major maize breeding programs every year. Lübberstedt’s work is building on these successes by aiming to make the process simpler and more efficient.
The Growing Impact Award is a competitive program that helps successful research previously supported through FFAR’s Seeding Solutions and New Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award programs move closer to practical use. By supporting high-performing projects aligned with FFAR’s Research Strategy, the program accelerates innovation, strengthens public and private partnerships and expands the benefits of FFAR-funded research for U.S. agriculture.
FFAR is investing in this research to complement the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research and Development Priority of Increasing Profitability of Farmers and Ranchers.
