Author: cwrc2023dev

Written by: Michelle Boulton

When Gavin Humphreys assumed his position as the senior research scientist (winter wheat improvement) with the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) Ottawa Research and Development Centre in 2014, his first order of business was rebuilding the program. He wanted to build a breeding pipeline, develop new germplasm, and produce new varieties of hard red winter wheat and (to a much lesser extent) soft white winter wheat adapted to Eastern Canada.

While “hard red winter wheat is a higher-value commodity in eastern Canada than soft red winter, which accounts for 80 to 85 percent of the acreage,” Humphreys says, “the lion’s share of the breeding effort goes into soft red winter wheat. If we can provide better varieties of hard red winter wheat, hopefully we can increase the market share of these varieties.”

“One of the advantages of winter wheat is 25 to 30 percent higher yield than spring wheat,” says Humphreys. “If we could get that advantage into more acreage, we could increase crop production by 25 to 30% using the same arable area. And that’s a big positive, not only for farmers but also for the productivity of agriculture in Canada.”

He’s been running two breeding pipelines. One is a doubled haploid pipeline, “which produces material that’s highly inbred in the laboratory in about a year and a half, when it would normally take five or six years to get to that point,” he explains. The other is a germplasm-based system in the field using a more traditional modified bulk breeding process, with plantings every fall and selection the following summer.

A new line (Ug9-26-32) made its way through the pipeline and was supported for registration a couple of years ago, but Humphreys says it didn’t get commercialized. “That was quite exciting for us because it was one of the first hard red winter wheats to get through that process, and the first one in about 15 years that the Ottawa program got to a point where it could be registered.”

The new line had very good end-use quality and it had moderate fusarium head blight resistance, but it was about 2% lower yielding than the check. “In Ontario, grain yield trumps everything,” he says. “If you don’t have yield, you’ll have some difficulty getting your lines supported and finding commercial partners.”

Humphreys is quite enthusiastic about some of the material he’s currently moving from the breeding program into the registration process. “The previous breeder at AAFC-Ottawa focussed on soft wheat, so I started from nothing, really. So, it’s going to take another year or so to get more material into the registration process,” he says. “We have some very exciting material in the first and second year of testing in Ontario and the Maritimes. So, we should be able to offer a variety to producers sometime in the next couple of years.”

Humphreys is trying to address two major challenges. One is winter hardiness. “Having superior resistance to winter stresses is absolutely critical, not only to retain the winter wheat acreage we have now, but, ideally, to expand the acreage,” he says.

The other is Fusarium head blight (FHB). He asserts that, “FHB has existed for a long time, and some will argue that we’ll never make progress on it, but I don’t believe that’s true. I think we know a lot more now than we did 10 or 20 years ago when the disease first started to become a real problem.”

Humphreys says improving FHB resistance will not only add to a farmer’s arsenal of protection against FHB damage, it will also minimize fungicide usage and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production, distribution, and application of fungicides.

“Coupled with higher yields, higher quality grain with less FHB damage will also give producers more value per weight for the wheat they’re producing,” he says.

Although Humphreys has been in his position for nine years, he still feels like he’s “kind of new to the system.” Despite that, he was very pleased by how quickly he was able to build collaborative relationships through the Canadian National Wheat Cluster. “Through the last round of cluster funding, I’ve seen tremendous growth in my capacity to work with others, offer plot exchanges, exchange germplasm, build on ideas that strengthen my breeding program, and hopefully also strengthen other breeding programs,” he concludes.

This Wheat Cluster project received funding from the Canadian Field Crop Research Alliance.

Written by: Michelle Boulton

Although his program is small, Andrew Burt, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Ottawa Research and Development Centre, has big ambitions. His research is focused on improving the profitability of hard red spring wheat for eastern Canada through better grain yields, Fusarium head blight (FHB) resistance, and end-use quality.

“Almost 90 percent of wheat production is in western Canada. And of the remaining 10 percent in eastern Canada, a lot is winter wheat. So, in terms of scale, we’re small,” he concedes, “but we’re covering a lot of territory—eastern Canada is a huge and varied landscape.”

He says one of the big strengths of his program is that it’s part of the AAFC network. “One of the important roles of public breeding is serving markets that would otherwise be ignored. This program does that by focusing on the specific needs of growers in eastern Canada.”

Through AAFC’s spring wheat breeding networks, Burt accesses western germplasm and has been incorporating Canada western red spring (CWRS) wheat cultivars and breeding lines from the Swift Current and Brandon programs into most of his crosses in the last five years. He tests them in two key breeding sites—the Ottawa Research Centre and the Charlottetown Research Centre—where the two sister arms of his program are run.

“Historically, eastern wheat has been higher yielding than western wheat. Breeders in eastern Canada have been more focused on Fusarium and powdery mildew resistance, and less focused on end-use quality,” says Burt. “Investment in western Canadian breeding has probably put an end to the yield differential between eastern and western hard red spring varieties, but we still have lower end-use quality.”

Burt sees that disparity as an opportunity for growth in the Canadian eastern red spring (CERS) class. “Something like 60% of what is milled in eastern Canada is CWRS wheat. If we can achieve quality that rivals CWRS wheat, perhaps we can capture interest in locally produced wheat and shorter supply chains to improve that percentage.”

Burt’s breeding efforts have been “trying to introduce higher grain quality, higher protein content, and better milling quality. That’s not an easy recipe to achieve—anytime you’re trying to make a fairly large change in protein quality or protein content, you’re doing well if you’re maintaining yield,” he says.

A persistent threat to grain quality is FHB. “The Fusarium challenge isn’t going away,” asserts Burt. “With increasing variability in the climate and increasing heat, it’s going to be a challenge to improve on the level of resistance we have in eastern Canada.”

Burt has been in his current position since 2018 and, while he has not yet successfully put forward a new variety for commercialization, two lines from his program were just supported for registration at the February 2023 Quebec Recommending Committee for Cereal meeting—ECSW237 is a feed wheat and ECSW244 is a milling wheat (suitable for the CERS market class). In 2019, a semi-dwarf line with moderate resistance to FHB was accepted for registration in Ontario, but he says the protein quantity was just too low to be supported in the CERS class, and it hasn’t been picked up for commercialization. He’s feeling more confident about some of the lines still coming in his pipeline.

“It’s a little disappointing to get to the end of five years and say, ‘it has been a rebuilding time,’ but that’s the reality,” he explains. “It takes a long time to steer these programs, and I think we’re in a good position for the next 5 to 10 years. We have a lot of material in the pipeline that combines higher protein with good end-use quality and, in some cases, high yield.”

This Wheat Cluster project received funding from the Canadian Field Crop Research Alliance.

Written by: Ellen Cottee

Lead Researcher: Dr. Colin Hiebert, AAFC – Morden

For much of history, farmers have been interested in growing the best crops possible. Starting in the 1800s, they realized saving seeds of their best performing plants would give them a higher yield – a primitive version of the selective breeding practices common in the industry today.

Many years have passed, and producers and researchers are living in the future – a world in which a stalk of wheat can be reduced its genome, giving incredible insight into the genes that help it survive, thrive and even fight off disease.

As a wheat geneticist, Dr. Colin Hiebert of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada – Morden has long been fascinated with the minutia of the important crop and how it can be improved for Canadian growers. His latest undertaking, Pre-Breeding and Development of Breeding Tools, is designed to take findings from the lab to the field.

Part of the 2018 – 2023 Canadian National Wheat Cluster, the project has three components: pre-breeding, DNA marker development and new resistant gene activities. Each of these contribute improved wheat breeding processes, especially in the areas of resistance and diversity.

“What motivated me to put in this proposal – and my proposal for the next cluster – is to try and fill some of the gaps that exist in the research continuum,” Hiebert explained. “You want to make certain that those [genetic] discoveries end up in the breeding programs and in the farmer’s field.”

Pre-breeding activities in particular are designed to bridge this gap. Genetic research into wheat relatives produces many interesting findings on disease resistance, performance and more – but these crops aren’t adapted for cultivation, nor are they practical for traditional breeding programs to use.

Through pre-breeding, those genetics can now be distilled into germplasm ready to be crossed with domesticated, tried-and-true wheat varieties for breeders to work with, creating new varieties with specific desired traits.

In addition, DNA markers, which indicate the genes specifically responsible for traits such as disease resistance, allow pre-breeding researchers to select or ‘stack’ genes that can increase resistance in the crop. Breeders can also use these markers to better select parents for crossbreeding and assessing which resistance genes made it through the whole breeding process.

“What we’re trying to do is develop markers that have a high predictive value, so you can use it in different ways,” Hiebert says. “DNA markers are really useful tools.”

Hiebert and his team have focused specifically on identifying genes resistant to common wheat diseases, including stem rust, leaf rust and ergot – and the results are promising.

Through genetic mapping and testing of a wheat line from Kyoto University in Japan, the team discovered a gene broadly effective against both North American and exotic races of stem rust.

“A gene like that is interesting because it gives us resistance to pathogens present today, and gives us some risk mitigation in the event that some of these exotic strains of the fungus end up being inadvertently transported to North America,” Hiebert explained.

As the current research cluster comes to a close, the team has germplasm ready to share with breeding programs and even more knowledge of the wheat genome. While pre-breeding and other genetic research doesn’t always result in an immediate in-the-field solution, Hiebert maintains it is critical to the future of plant breeding.

“Having the support of producer groups and other funders, for them to have that foresight to invest money now even when the payoff isn’t immediate, is great,” Hiebert said. “We know we need tools down the road, and if we don’t start now, the well runs dry.”

Written by: Ellen Cottee

Lead Researcher: Dr. Ron Knox, AAFC – Swift Current

Across the wheat industry, breeders, growers and researchers alike are on the hunt for more ways to improve the crop. From increased yields to higher quality, pest and disease resistance to protein levels, there are several ways to ensure Canada’s wheat is the best it can be.

It will take all members of this chain and many solutions to create the varieties that will carry Canada’s wheat into the future, but one key component is the introduction of biotechnological tools to the process.

Dr. Ron Knox of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada – Swift Current has been working on plant pathology and breeding efforts for much of his career. Leading his newest project, Application of Biotechnological Tools to Wheat Breeding, Knox and his team seek to accelerate and improve breeding via futuristic-sounding methods.

Part of the 2018-23 Canadian Wheat Research Cluster, the project uses marker-assisted breeding and double haploid production to assist breeders in their efforts to bring forward the best wheat yet.

“Breeders have been working at their craft for decades, so it’s getting harder and harder to make those increases in performance, yield, all those components,” Knox explained. “The application of these technologies is a tool that allows them to continue making those marginal increases.”

Marker-assisted breeding allows researchers to use established or newly developed markers to identify key traits in lines of wheat selected for crossbreeding as parents. Once these lines are confirmed to have desired traits, researchers and traditional breeders work together to plan and construct crosses around these traits and their expression in the plant.

Another component of the project’s research is in double haploid production, a process that can cut traditional breeding from five or six plant generations to one. Focusing on the female gamete of the plant, researchers stimulate egg division in a wheat plant using corn, as no genetic material from the corn carries through. Because the embryo comes from a single plant, it is genetically pure or homogenous, creating predictability for breeding.

It’s not just the time saved on breeding cycles that benefits breeders; double haploid breeding also ensures fewer recombinations, or shuffling of the genes, making it easier to predict the genes and traits the plant will exhibit.

“Our strategy is to use simple crosses of elite lines that have complementary traits,” Knox said. “Getting combinations of genes and being able to recycle that improved line back into breeding as a parent, that greatly improves the breeding efficiencies.”

This research will allow traditional breeders to create new varieties with strong economic benefits, including pest resistance, performance in the field and quality.

Looking to the future of biotechnological tools in wheat breeding, Knox believes greater understanding of the wheat genome will identify further trait markings, such as yield and stress resistance. Putting this research into breeding, however, isn’t necessarily simple.

“Those traits have a lot of interaction with the environment, so it’s that much more challenging to validate the markers – we have to sample environments, which means testing populations in multiple locations over multiple years, he explained. “That takes patience and continued support.”

Written by: Ian Doig

Canada is the fifth largest wheat producing nation in the world, and most of the nation’s crop is grown on the Prairies. As wheat represents such a foundational part of the region’s farm economy, the importance of cultivar development is self-evident. “It’s very, very critical to continuously develop new varieties of CPS wheat for Western Canada,” said Harpinder Randhawa, research scientist and wheat breeder with the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) Lethbridge Research and Development Centre. CPS breeding and end-use quality has evolved over the years, he added.

 “We do three levels of cultivar improvement,” said Randhawa. “We look into their economic performance, disease package and resistance to various biotic and abiotic stresses. We also either maintain or improve the functional quality and use quality of wheat.”

 CPSR varieties have typically exhibited protein, hardness and gluten strength in the medium category. While protein and hardness characteristics have remained in this desirable range, the development of various types of bread by grain purchasing nations has changed market requirements for gluten characteristics. Demand has pushed breeders to increase gluten strength to where it is on par with CWRS varieties and even beyond.

HY2090 is a Canada Prairie Spring Red (CPSR) cultivar Randhawa and his AAFC team have developed with supplementary funding under the most recent five-year Canadian National Wheat Cluster. Now in the seed production stage, it has been given the name AAC Westlock. The moniker is a tip of the hat to the town of Westlock, which is located north of Edmonton where CPS acreage is particularly high. It exhibits the qualities end-users demand as well as a strong agronomic package. AAC Westlock is six to seven per cent higher yielding than control variety AAC Penhold. A semi-dwarf cultivar preferred by farmers, it has excellent straw strength. The variety’s very good disease package includes resistance to FHB, leaf rust, stripe rust, stem rust and common bunt as well as to stem rust varieties not yet prevalent in Canada. In the aggregate, these positives add up to an economic win on a farmer’s balance sheet.

Notably, AAC Westlock was developed with the assistance of the double haploid breeding process and genetic marker technology in a mere six years, whereas 10 years has been more typical. “Genomic selection is one of the tools that we have,” said Randhawa. “We try to deploy all the breeding tools that are available to us to aid in making selections or predictions for development of new cultivars.” The new variety will be marketed by SeCan and is expected to be available for purchase by farmers in 2024.

As pleased as he is with this latest breeding success story, Randhawa emphasized that cultivar improvement is an ongoing process that responds to the evolving needs of farmers and end users. The low moisture conditions experienced during the 2021 and 2022 growing seasons seriously impacted crops in various regions of the Prairies. In response, the AAFC breeding program is now examining its germplasm stock for traits that can boost the resilience of crops in the face of harsh summer conditions. “The last couple of years, we have been hit very hard with drought and heat, and we are looking into germplasm that can help us develop cultivars that are resistant to abiotic stresses, especially drought,” said Randhawa.