Novel pre-breeding germplasm for commercial development of sustainable traits in crops

Agriculture needs a much faster way of developing crops with new traits to meet changing commercial, socio-economic and environmental needs. For over 50 years, agriculture has relied on intensive application of chemicals and fertilizers, and yields have grown steadily under this regime. Increasingly, however, agrochemicals are being withdrawn for environmental reasons, and yields are plateauing. New races of pathogens are evolving that can have devastating effects on crops, and they can spread round the globe in a short period of time. Agricultural researchers in academia and industry are increasingly turning to Genetic Improvement Networks (GINs) undertaking 'pre-breeding' activities to find important new traits for sustainable agriculture in this changing world. Pre-breeding is a necessary first step in harnessing novel traits from wild relatives and other unimproved germplasm. However, a major challenge is to translate basic research arising from GINs into commercial reality to produce crop cultivars with improved traits in short timescales. Our project develops a new business strategy to accelerate deployment of traits into crops using disease resistance in Brassica napus as a model.

Brassica napus (oilseed rape, OSR) is the most important temperate oilseed crop in the world with a production of close to 70 million metric tonnes and is the third most important crop in the UK after wheat and barley. Diseases are a major limitation for production of OSR, a problem exacerbated by climate change and restrictions on the use of agrochemicals for environmental reasons. Light leaf spot (LLS), caused by Pyrenopeziza brassicae, has become the most damaging disease in the UK since 2012. Economic losses to LLS in the UK reached over £200M in 2016 and have been consistently over £80M between 2012 and 2018. There are no known resistance (R) genes to LLS, and the pathogen has developed multiple fungicide insensitivities including tolerance to azoles, the most commonly-used fungicide class used in the UK and probably Europe.

The project combines the expertise in LLS pathology at the University of Hertfordshire with OSR genomic technology at the John Innes Centre. The technical aim of our project is to develop improved resistance to LLS. We will evaluate OSR accessions with promising LLS resistance identified in an earlier study and benchmark them them with elite cultivars on the current Recommended List. We will evaluate whether screening could be performed as a service to the breeding industry or transferred through consultancy as a training module. We will also strengthen the IP position of a novel susceptibility gene identified in an earlier study. We will modify the gene using both a non-GM and GM approaches to test whether this increases resistance to LLS. Both approaches provide the opportunity to provide patent protection for the susceptibility gene.

In addition to the technical aims, we will also develop a business plan defining a commercially viable strategy for introduction of important new traits for sustainable agriculture into crops. The business plan will include strategies for strengthening the Intellectual Property position of results from crop-related research and for researchers to work more effectively with industry through public/private partnerships. Whist the focus of our research is on OSR, the business plan will also be applicable to traits from other crop species