Breakthrough in new approach to mining agricultural gene banks for food security

A Research team for ‘Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS)’  has opened global consultations to enrich agricultural innovation for food security.

The innovative new approach seeks to rapidly identifying plant genetic material that could produce new crop varieties  to serve agricultural researchers worldwide.

A release made available to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) said the FIGS method is an innovative alternative to traditional gene bank searching, and is tailored to reduce hunger, fight crop disease and other stresses such as excessive drought and heat.

It said FIGS used cutting-edge applied Bayesian mathematics that matched plant traits with geographical location or information to help plant breeders to more effectively mine the millions of plant seed samples conserved in the world’s agricultural gene banks.

It further explained that the new method facilitates the rapid identification of traits that make crop varieties resistant to drought, excessive heat or cold, to insect pests and a variety of crop diseases that reduce farm yields in low-income and developed countries.

“FIGS has been developed, tested and refined over the past 6 years by a research team from ICARDA – The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas with partners including the Vavilov Institute (Russia), the Nordgengenebank  (Nordic Region) and the Australian Winter Cereals Collection,” it said.

It said following the recent publication of several new research trials, the FIGS team was now launching an international consultation to help spread the practice among the global scientific community, and to learn together to further improve the FIGS tool.

The release added that FIGS-selected material had been requested by more than 20 crop research institutes worldwide in Australia, West Asia, North Africa, Europe and North America.

It quoted Dr. Ken Street, a senior genetic resource scientist at ICARDA, as having explained that the FIGS approach  “… uses detailed information about the environment from which the plant genetic samples were collected to precisely predict where plant traits such as disease resistance or adaptability to extreme weather conditions are likely to evolve.

“From this, we assemble smaller subsets of genetic material that have a high potential of containing the plant traits that breeders need to develop their robust new varieties.

The release stated that  current methods and funding levels made it virtually impossible to screen all available plant genetic materials to identify plants that carry genetic variation required for new crop breeding improvements and breakthroughs.

This, it said, was a major constraint to increasing crop productivity.  To breed new crop varieties with resistance and new characteristics requires access to novel genes that possess the desired trait. These novel genes are buried in plant genetic resource collections like those conserved within the CGIAR genebanks and the many national genebanks worldwide.

The release indicated that the FIGS approach had proved successful where large scale ‘screening exercises’ had previously failed to find their target.  “New genes for resistance to Powdery Mildew, Sunn Pest and Russian Wheat Aphid have been identified in relatively small plant genetic FIGS sets.”

Recently, using a specially-targeted FIGS subset of potentially resistant plant materials, ICARDA identified 12 resistant accessions, which are now being used in the ICARDA breeding programme, and are available on request.

Over 1700 agricultural gene banks worldwide and thousands of crop researchers can increase the speed of their research results by applying FIGS.

Source: GNA