Science and Technology for Canadians

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Summary

It's the single most important source of plant protein in our diet, a cornerstone of Canadian agriculture and the subject of millions of postcards. A derivative of wheat's wild relatives was cultivated in the Middle East nearly ten thousand years ago. Since then, we've been tinkering with it... trying to make the perfect crop.

Transcript of Video

Jill Deacon
There are few images as classically Canadian as a field of wheat just before harvest. Our breadbasket is a big part of what makes Canada unique. Still, the robust crops that you see owe as much to science as they do to nature. We've been tinkering with traits of these products for years, and with every gain we've made, something else has been lost.

Jay Ingram
It's the single most important source of plant protein in our diet, a cornerstone of Canadian agriculture and the subject of millions of postcards. A derivative of wheat's wild relatives was cultivated in the Middle East nearly ten thousand years ago. Since then, we've been tinkering with it... trying to make the perfect crop.

We've done it by crossbreeding... selecting desired traits from one plant, and breeding those with selected traits from another. Today, our wheat is straight, easy to harvest and high yield... and in a fairly harsh climate, matures in a short period of time. But in creating our made-to-measure wheat, some of its basic abilities were left behind, abilities like fighting off disease and resisting pests. But those traits still exist in wheat's original wild relatives.

Here at Plant Gene Resources of Canada in Saskatoon, those traits, important traits, are being conserved and made available for those who would introduce them into our modern crops.

Dr. Ken Richards
We provide some of the... the raw materials for some of the... the desired traits that the plant breeders need to solve very complex problems that exist in Canada.

Jay Ingram
The collection stores more than 110,000 samples of seeds from around the world. Varieties of oats, wheat, flax, sunflower, beans, barley and more... a recorded history of plants written in their seeds.

Dr. Ken Richards is research manager at the Centre. He believes the collection plays an important role in maintaining Canada's agriculture.

Dr. Ken Richards
When a particular plant breeder is looking for a specific trait, let's say resistance to a particular disease... he will look at our data base and say uhhh, yes indeed, they do have some materials that they've identified with resistance to this disease or do they have a potentially good yield or some indication of resistance or tolerance to a particular stress, and they will request that material from us. Then we will package that seed up, and send them a small sample of that seed. The plant breeder, in turn, will then use that seed in crosses and in incorporating into his breeding program.

Jay Ingram
It's not just wheat they care about. To these scientists, all our crops can be improved.

Dr. Ken Richards
The wild oat species are very important to incorporate into the cultivated oat. The wild oat species are known to have a resistance to a crown-rust disease, a disease very important to oat production across the Canadian Prairies. The challenge for the plant breeders is to move this resistance from the wild material into the cultivated material, and at the same time, not to bring along the detrimental characteristics, the shattering and hairiness, into the cultivated material.

Jay Ingram
It's genes, short stretches of DNA that carry the traits of a plant from parent to offspring. By focusing on individual genes, crop scientists like Dr. Daryl Somers can identify specific characteristics that can make changes in a plant.

Dr. Daryl Somers
This lab contributes to... to identification by identifying unique genes which are of interest in plant breeding - and we have the capacity to clone genes and to characterize those genes and to understand how they're inherited and how they may improve the particular crops that we're working on. In the case of an oat-breeding program, where a plant breeder may be using a large population, what we have the ability to do is to screen through a large population of plants... many, many thousands and thousands of plants can be screened very rapidly through DNA finger-printing and among those thousands and thousand of plants, we can select out – based on DNA finger prints, which plants have the potential to express the traits that a breeder is interested in.

Jay Ingram
After identification, seeds are packaged and stored in one of three facilities at the Centre, where they are ready to be sent out to points around the globe.

Increasing crop yield is at the top of the priority list for plant breeders across Canada and around the world. Looking back at the origins of our highly bred crops... canola, wheat, barley or oats... makes for hardier and more successful plants, and that means more food for an ever increasing population.