Production | Fall 2008
A genetically complex crop.
By Joy Gregory
How science is 'stacking' your canola.
With solid research driving every major improvement to Canada's top oilseed crop, canola's success story is far from over, says Faouzi Bekkaoui, a crop scientist at the National Research Council, Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon.
Crop breeding techniques that enable the insertion of a specific gene into a canola variety transformed the industry by giving farmers access to varieties with herbicide-resistance. But a lot of other “desirable traits are controlled by more than one gene,” says Bekkaoui, so big improvements are more difficult to achieve.
Take drought tolerance, for example. Recognizing its value to farmers, researchers are currently growing canola under dry conditions, then examining tissue of plants that do well to see which genes are expressed and may be at work. “This is foundational research that's very time consuming as we have to repeat the experiment to see what is happening,” says Bekkaoui.
Repetition gets even more complicated when the science moves out of the lab and into the field, where the varieties under study may face an entirely unexpected set of growing conditions.
On the plus side, scientists know that canola has more than 60,000 genes. They have sequenced close to 700,000 combinations, or expressed sequence tags (ESTs). ESTs help researchers zero in on the functional parts of genetic material, which is where gene expression (like drought tolerance) takes place.
A better understanding of specific ESTs will give scientists the chance to 'stack' genes that improve crop yield by producing hardier seeds with greater resistance to everything from drought to excess moisture and disease, says Stewart Brandt, North American breeding manager for Bayer CropScience.
Details on varieties under development can't be shared, but Brandt predicts farmers will like what new varieties will soon begin to deliver on everything from disease and stress tolerance to improved fatty-acid profiles.
