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Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research finds kindred spirit in GCP

Africa, Comparative genomics in cereals, Genomics, Groundnuts, Latin America, Legumes, Maize, Partnerships, Sorghum No Responses »

May 292015

A little over a decade ago, a PhD student in Brazil was poring over sorghum genes, trying to isolate one that helps plants withstand acidic soils.

Sorghum

Scientists at the Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research (EMBRAPA) had been researching plants that can grow well in acidic soils since the mid-1970s.

“What we have done within the Generation Challenge Programme,” explains Jurandir Magalhães, now a senior scientist for EMBRAPA, as he reflects back on the past decade, “is speed up maize and sorghum breeding for acidic soil adaptation”.

EMBRAPA partnered with the CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) to advance plant genetics so as to breed aluminium-tolerant crops that will improve yields in harsh environments, in turn improving the quality of life for farmers.

Almost 70 percent of Brazil’s arable land is made up of acidic soils. That means the soil has toxic levels of aluminium and low levels of phosphorous – a lethal combination that makes crop production unsustainable. Aluminium toxicity in soil comes close to rivalling drought as a food-security threat in critical tropical food-producing regions. This is because acidic soils reduce root growth and deprive plants of the nutrients and water they need to grow.

Robert Schaffert – EMBRAPA’s longest-serving sorghum breeder – had developed mapping populations for aluminium tolerance in sorghum; these populations were the basis for the work supported by GCP.

During the first four years of the 10-year Programme, Jurandir was able to identify and clone the major aluminium-tolerance gene in sorghum – Alt_SB – using these mapping populations. The cloned gene has since enabled researchers across Africa and Asia to quickly and efficiently breed improved sorghum and maize plants that can withstand acidic soils.

Jurandir, speaking today about the work to advance sorghum genetic resources, says: “Wherever there are acidic soils with aluminium toxicity and low phosphorous availability, our results should be applicable.”

His story with EMBRAPA is one of many where GCP-supported projects have been instrumental in helping global research centres achieve their goals, which ultimately will help farmers worldwide.

Common objectives

Jurandir is now a research scientist in molecular genetics and genomics at the EMBRAPA Maize & Sorghum research centre. He and colleagues at the centre partnered with scientists in Africa, Asia and the US to identify and clone genes in sorghum, maize and rice that confer resistance or tolerance to stresses such as soil acidity, phosphorus efficiency, drought, pests and diseases.

Maize growing in Brazil.

“One important focus of GCP was linking basic research to applied crop breeding,” Jurandir says. “This is also the general orientation of our programme at EMBRAPA. We develop projects and research to produce, adapt and diffuse knowledge and technologies in maize and sorghum production by the efficient and rational use of natural resources.

“GCP provided both financial support and a rich scientific community that were useful to help us attain our common objectives.”

EMBRAPA’s work on cloning the Alt_SB gene would prove to be one of the first steps in GCP’s foundation sorghum and maize projects, both of which sought to provide farmers in the developing world with crops that will not only survive but thrive in the acidic soils where aluminium toxicity reduces crop production.

Leon Kochian of Cornell University in the US was Jurandir’s supervisor at the time when they applied for GCP funding. Leon was a Principal Investigator for various GCP research projects, researching how to improve grain yields of crops grown in acidic soils.

“The breeders are so important,” says Leon about the importance of supporting institutes such as EMBRAPA to advance plant genetics. “Ultimately, they are the cliché of ‘the rubber hits the road’. They’re the ones who translate what we’re trying to figure out into the actual crop improvements. That’s really what it’s all about.”

“That’s why EMBRAPA is a unique institution. Their mission is to get improved seed out, new germplasm out, for the farmers. They have the researchers in sorghum and maize breeding [Robert Schaffert and Sidney Parentoni] and molecular biology [Jurandir Magalhães and Claudia Guimarães].”

Maize farmers in Brazil.

Great minds think alike

Jurandir’s EMBRAPA colleague Claudia Guimarães, a plant molecular geneticist focusing on maize, says GCP promoted ‘products’, which also echoed the mission statement of EMBRAPA’s Maize & Sorghum research centre.

The centre’s mission is to: ‘Generate, adapt and transfer knowledge and technology that allows for the efficient production and use of maize, sorghum, and natural resources as well as promotes competitiveness in the agriculture sector, sustainable development, and the well-being of society.’

GCP, says Claudia, “wanted to extract something else from the science – products – the idea of a real, touchable product. You have to have progress: germplasm, lines, markers; they are quite practical things.

“The major goal of GCP is to deliver products that can improve people’s lives worldwide. So it needs to be readily available and useful for other scientists and for the whole community.”

GCP wanted to ensure that research products could and would be adopted, adapted and applied for the ultimate benefit of resource-poor farmers. The Programme therefore set out to catalyse interactions between the various players who are needed to bridge the gap between strategic research in advanced labs and resource-poor farmers.

GCP and EMBRAPA were both working towards tangible applied outcomes, says Claudia: “GCP was not only giving you money, they are really serious about what are you doing: ‘Did you deliver everything you promised?’”

Claudia delivered. She and her team at EMBRAPA were able to find an important aluminium-tolerance gene in maize similar to the sorghum gene. This outcome provided the basic materials for molecular-breeding programmes focusing on improving maize production and stability on acidic soils in Africa and other developing regions.

Maize trials in the field at EMBRAPA. The maize plants on the left are aluminium-tolerant while those on the right are not.

Multifaceted and tangible results

Through further GCP funding, EMBRAPA researchers Robert Schaffert and Sidney Parentoni were able to work together with two researchers from Kenya, Dickson Ligeyo and Samuel Gudu, to develop a breeding programme to combine the improved Brazilian germplasm with locally adapted Kenyan materials. A new base of improved germplasm was established for Kenyan breeders, which allowed the development of varieties adapted to acidic soils in Kenya.

Sidney, a maize breeder for GCP projects and now the deputy head of research and development for EMBRAPA Maize & Sorghum, says that the benefits of being part of GCP are multifaceted: “It was very important, not only for EMBRAPA as an institute, but also individually for each of the participants that had the opportunity to interact with partners in different parts of the word,” says Sidney.

A Kenyan farmer with her sorghum crop.

“Each of them adds a piece to build the results achieved by GCP, which from my perspective promoted a number of advances in the areas of genetics and breeding.

“Technologies such as root image scanning developed at Cornell [University] were transferred to EMBRAPA and allowed us to do large-scale screening in a number of maize and sorghum genotypes with large impacts in phosphorous-efficiency studies.

“Scientists from Africa were trained in breeding and screening techniques at EMBRAPA, and Brazilian scientists had the opportunity to go to Africa and interact with African researchers to jointly develop strategies for breeding maize and sorghum for low-phosphorous and acidic soils.

“These trainings and exchanges of experiences were very important for the people and for the institutions involved,” says Sidney.

Sustainable partnerships to break ground for groundnut

Groundnut

Soraya Leal-Bertioli is a researcher in the EMBRAPA Genetic Resources & Biotechnology centre. She works on groundnut (also known as peanut), and formed part of the GCP team working on groundnut with tolerance to drought and resistance to diseases and fungal contamination. She concurs that GCP united researchers from all over the globe in a common goal.

“GCP not only identified groups, but it went out, searched for people and invited contributions, offered resources to get them together. GCP brought partnerships to a whole new level,” Soraya says.

“Last time I checked there were 200 partners in 50 countries. No one is able to do that. It required a lot of money, a lot of resources, but the way it was dealt with in GCP was: ‘Let’s reach out for the main players, the ones who have the technology, and also the ones who can use the technology’.

“GCP used the resources for the benefit of the community and brought everybody together.”

Soraya says the traditional way of funding research often had ‘no structure’.

“Sometimes a university or funding body receives a large amount of money and decides to build something, a new institute in the middle of the jungle somewhere, but they don’t have anybody to run it; it is not sustainable.

“What GCP did was help to provide the structure and the agents for the whole system. They helped train the people to run the whole system. This is a very sustainable model, which is very likely to give good results in a much shorter time frame than other programmes.”

Watch Soraya – and other members of the team – discuss the complex personality of groundnut and groundnut research in our video series:

Genetic stocks AND people are products

The products and outcomes of the collaboration with GCP have included both the tangible and the not-so-tangible. Sidney says that a large quantity of Brazilian improved maize and sorghum lines tolerant to acidic soils has been developed over the years at EMBRAPA.

“These materials were shared with partners in Africa, and this was a major contribution to Kenyan farmers, as part of this collaborative work done in the scope of GCP.

“To be part of the programme has been very important for EMBRAPA’s research team. It has given us the opportunity to interact with a diversity of institutes.”

Sidney mentions institutes they gave worked with through GCP, including Cornell University and Texas A&M University in the US, the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), and various institutes in Africa, such as Moi University, Kenya, and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO).

Sidney concludes: “In this large network of partnerships, EMBRAPA was able to learn and to share information in a highly productive way.

“From my perspective, the involvement with GCP projects allowed me to grow as a researcher and as a person, and also at the same time to share and to acquire new knowledge in a number of areas. I think it was a ‘win-win’ interaction for all the participants.”

Many of the products generated within the scope of GCP, such as markers and germplasm, are already available within EMBRAPA’s breeding programmes. Avenues for further research have been paved based on the GCP achievements, and these new research lines will be continued within new projects.

As Claudia says: “The strong partnerships built along the way with GCP will be maintained by us joining with new research teams from other institutes and countries to work on new projects.”

Giants make giant strides in quest for drought-tolerant wheat

Asia, Capacity building, Crop breeding, Crop information and data management, Genetics, Integrated Breeding Platform, Wheat No Responses »

Mar 262015

Wheat growing in China.

For as long as peoples and countries have traded wheat, drought has continually played a part in dictating its availability and price. Developed countries have become more able to accommodate the bad years by using intensive agricultural practices to grow and store more wheat during more favourable years. However, farmers, traders and consumers are still at the mercy of drought when it comes to wheat availability and prices.

A recent example where drought in just one country inflated the world’s wheat prices was in the People’s Republic of China during 2010–11.

For almost six months, eight provinces in the north of China received little to no rain. Known as the breadbasket of China, these eight provinces grow more than 80 percent of the country’s total wheat and collectively produce more wheat than anywhere else in the world.

It was the worst drought to hit the provinces in 60 years.

With over 1.3 billion mouths to feed, China’s demand for wheat is high and ever increasing. When this demand was coupled with the reduced wheat yield caused by the severe 2010–11 drought, wheat prices around the world rose. While this price rise was beneficial for wheat growers in other countries, it made wheat unaffordable for many consumers and traders in developing nations.

Although this was a one-in-60-year event, previous droughts had already made locals question the sustainability of wheat production in this naturally dry region of China, where water consumption has increased in the past 50 years due to intensive agriculture, industry and a growing and increasingly urbanised population.

Wheat growers and breeders know they need to find wheat varieties and apply practices that will help them adapt to and tolerate drier conditions and still produce sustainable yields.

Luckily, they have help from a community of breeders around the world.

An Uyghur baker displays his bread in Kashi, Xinjiang, China.

Sharing knowledge to improve breeding efficiency and sustainability

In March 2009, 70 international plant breeding leaders and experts from the public and private sector converged in Montpellier, France, as part of a CGIAR Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) initiative to draw up roadmaps to improve plant-breeding efficiency in developing countries.

Richard Trethowan, professor in plant breeding at the University of Sydney, Australia, remembers the meeting distinctly. “We all got together and thought how we could use what we had learnt during the first phase of GCP [2004–2009] – all the genetics and molecular-breeding work – to deliver new varieties of crops, particularly in countries where it will have the greatest impact.”

The resulting roadmap for wheat became the GCP Wheat Research Initiative (RI), with Richard as Product Delivery Coordinator. It had two very clear destinations in mind: China and India.

Richard explains why China and India were targeted – as the world’s two wheat-production giants – in the video below.

Wheat Research Initiative developed capacity and infrastructure in China and India The Wheat RI aimed to integrate genetic diversity for water-use efficiency and heat tolerance into Chinese and Indian breeding programmes. Some aspects of the RI sprang from work led by Francis Ogbonnaya of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and by Peter Langridge of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG). Jean-Marcel Ribaut, GCP Director, says of the work: “The GCP’s RI approach was not about large impacts in the short term. Rather, what GCP demonstrated was definitive proof-of-concept of the power of molecular breeding to increase crop productivity, thereby improving food security. Other agencies are now able to upscale and outscale the proven concept at the national, or even at the regional level.”

Like China, India is an extremely water-stressed country, with the water table in many places falling at an alarming rate. In North Gujarat alone, an established wheat district in western India, the water table is reported to be dropping by as much as six metres per year.

Delivering wheat varieties that have improved water-use efficiency and higher tolerance to drought will have the greatest impact in these countries, given they are the two largest producers of wheat worldwide.

“Even though the Initiative is set to conclude in 2015, the outcomes have already been absolutely phenomenal for such a short time-bound project, given that wheat is such a complex plant to work with,” exclaims Richard. “While we are still a few years away from releasing new drought-tolerant varieties, we have been able to develop systems and build capacity to reduce the time it takes to develop and release these varieties.”

Tapping into genetic diversity to enhance wheat’s drought and heat tolerance

Spikes of emmer wheat.

One project that impressed Richard was that led by Satish Misra, GCP Principal Investigator and senior wheat breeder at Agharkar Research Institute, Pune, India.

In a collaboration with the University of Sydney, Australia, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the project identified novel genes associated with drought- and heat-tolerance traits in ancestral wheat lines (of emmer wheat).

Emmer wheat is a minor crop grown mainly in marginal lands, where farmers can produce a small harvest but nowhere near the yield of more elite cultivated lines. Satish explains that emmer wheat lines are very useful for breeders because they have a larger diversity of novel genes than more popular wheat types, such as durum or bread wheat.

Durum wheat spike.

“Durum lines are more commonly used by breeders because of their high yield and hard grain, which is used to make bread wheat and pasta,” Satish says. “However, because of their popularity and continual use in breeding, durum wheat lines have become less and less diverse with years of cultivation.”

The first task was to identify emmer lines that might have genes for drought and heat tolerance. Satish says that CIMMYT played an important part in this process. “They gave us access to their gene bank, which contains almost 2,000 emmer lines. More importantly, they helped us develop a reference set that encapsulated all the diversity found in the emmer lines they had.”

A reference set reduces the number of choices that breeders have to search through, from thousands down to a few hundred – in this case, 300 emmer lines.

“CIMMYT also developed 30 synthetic emmer wheat lines by crossing wild emmer wheat species with domesticated wheat species,” says Satish. “The synthetic lines contain the novel drought- and heat-tolerance genes.”

Satish and Richard’s teams crossed these synthetic lines with durum wheat lines and identified 41 resulting lines with high levels of stress tolerance. These are undergoing further evaluation in India and Australia.

“What Satish has been able to do in five years is amazing and is currently having a big impact in wheat breeding in India and Australia,” says Richard. “We’ve had local breeding companies here in Australia come to us requesting the lines we developed. The same is happening in India, too.”

Reaping existing skills

A baker butters naan bread in Hyderabad, India.

For Richard, the preliminary success of the Wheat RI is due, at least in part, to the speed with which national breeding programmes in both China and India are learning and incorporating new molecular-breeding techniques.

“This was another reason why we chose to focus on China and India: they had the infrastructure and human capacity to start doing this almost immediately,” says Richard. “In other countries where GCP is investing, more time is going into teaching breeders the basics of molecular breeding and genetics. In China and India, they already have that basic understanding and are able to quickly incorporate it into their current programmes.”

This does not mean, however, that the work is not focused on building capacity, given that molecular breeding is still a relatively new concept for many breeders around the world.

Ruilian Jing says the China project is continually working to educate and train wheat breeders in molecular-breeding techniques.

“When we started the project, we found that most institutions that focus on wheat breeding in China had the equipment to do marker-assisted breeding but were unsure how to use it,” says Ruilian, professor in plant breeding at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and Principal Investigator for the Wheat RI’s drought-tolerant wheat project in China.

Much of Ruilian’s work in China has been in educating these breeders so they can start achieving outcomes.

Younger researchers taking a lead

Ruilian explains that those leading the charge to become educated in molecular-breeding techniques are young researchers, including seven PhD students and one Master’s student supported by the project in China.

One such researcher who is enthusiastically applying these new approaches is Yonggui Xiao, a molecular plant breeder at the Institute of Crop Science, CAAS.

“Working as part of this GCP project gave me my first opportunity to practice using molecular-breeding techniques to improve the quality and yield of wheat under drought conditions,” says Yonggui.

“We have so far successfully used several molecular markers to produce an advanced variety, with higher yield and preferred qualities [taste, grain colour] under water stress, and this will be released to farmers [in 2015].”

Women of the Nakhi people harvest wheat in Songzanlinsi, Yunnan, China.

Yonggui is now expanding the application of the technology to develop varieties with resistance to powdery mildew, a fungal disease that can reduce wheat yields and quality during non-drought years. “Overall, we have been impressed by how these new techniques complement our conventional breeding techniques to improve selection efficiency, in turn reducing the time and costs of producing advanced varieties,” says Yonggui.

Success stories like these make Ruilian’s job easier as she tries to encourage more and more plant breeders to experiment with these new breeding techniques.

At the same time, she is impressed by this new generation of molecular wheat breeders who will ensure that these techniques benefit wheat research in many years to come: “This form of capacity, the human capacity, which we are building, is what will leave the largest legacy in China and help this technology spread from generation to generation and crop to crop.”

Overcoming complex traits, genes and wary breeders

Wheat farmer in India.

Across the Himalayas, Ruilian’s Indian counterpart, Vinod Prabhu, is just as pleased with the progress and results his team are producing.

“Over the last five years, we have discovered several water-use efficiency traits and their related genes, bred new lines to incorporate the genes and traits and run national trials, all of which would be unheard of using only conventional breeding practices,” says Vinod, Head of the Genetics Division at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi and the Principal Investigator for the Wheat RI’s drought-tolerant wheat project in India.

By the end of the projects in November 2015, partners in China and India will deliver 15–20 new wheat lines with drought and heat tolerance, adapted to each country’s conditions. An additional target for both China and India is to produce four wheat varieties with improved water-use efficiency and higher heat tolerance. These varieties will have the potential to cover about 24 million hectares and minimise yield loss from heat or drought, or both, by up to 20–50 percent.

Vinod confides that all these outcomes are far more than what he initially expected they would achieve: “When we started, we had a lot of reservations about the complexity of breeding for drought tolerance in wheat as well as the acceptance and uptake of these new breeding techniques by conventional breeders.”

Vinod’s primary role has been to coordinate the Indian centres working on the project (see box at end). But he has also been working to convince Indian plant breeders that these unconventional, new breeding techniques will improve their efficiency and aid in their quest to breed for heat- and drought-tolerant wheat varieties.

“Many world-leading wheat breeders were wary at first, but they have definitely started to see the merit in using the technology to enhance their conventional methods as we edge closer towards releasing new varieties in such a short time,” says Vinod.

Wheat seed ready for planting in Punjab, India.

Incorporating conventional methods

An aspect of the Wheat RI that Ruilian and Vinod have been continually promoting is the importance of conventional breeding methods. “These new molecular-breeding techniques are only a small part of the whole breeding process,” says Ruilian. “Yes, they provide a big impact, but in the grand scheme of things they need to be viewed as one tool in a breeder’s tool box.”

For more information on conventional versus molecular breeding, or marker-assisted breeding, see our quick guide here on the Sunset Blog.

Phenotyping: How to manage a subjective process

One of the most important processes of the Wheat RI, and plant breeding in general, is phenotyping: measuring and recording observable characteristics of the plant such as drought tolerance or susceptibility to pests and diseases. Breeders phenotype the plants they have developed to see which ones have the traits they are interested in and also – for molecular breeding to be possible – to establish links between specific genes and specific traits.

Unfortunately, phenotyping has caused a bit of trouble for both Chinese and Indian partners. The challenge stems from the fact that one person’s observations about a plant’s phenotype or characteristics may not be the same as another person’s.

“This is always a challenge for any collaborative plant-breeding project,” says Vinod. “Unless all trials are inspected by one person, there will always be a risk of inconsistent observations.

Scientists from South Asia learn phenotyping on a training course at CIMMYT.

To help overcome this inconsistency, one of the first activities of the Wheat RI was to develop phenotyping protocols that allowed researchers in different research institutes and countries to collect comparable data. GCP enlisted Matthew Reynolds, a wheat physiologist at CIMMYT, to help with this.

“Each breeder has their own ways to do things, so it’s important to develop standardised protocols, particularly for a transnational project like this,” explains Matthew. “We developed a few standardised phenotyping manuals and travelled to China to give some intensive hands-on training.”

This problem is not unique to China and India. Another GCP wheat project is providing promising results to help overcome the risk of inconsistency and increase the efficiency and accuracy of phenotyping. Led by Fernanda Dreccer, based at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in collaboration with the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), the project is developing a reliable phenotyping approach to detect drought-adaptive traits in wheat crops using cheap and simple tools.

“For example, using just a camera you can analyse crop cover, which is an important trait for shading the crop and/or trapping heat,” says Fernanda. “The idea was to test different non-invasive, low-cost tools and compare them to find something that would provide accurate and useful data related to identifying drought-tolerance traits.”

Another important aspect of phenotyping that Fernanda’s project is helping with is constant and consistent analysis of a crop’s surroundings. “It’s just as important to measure the environment of the crop as it is [to measure] the crop itself to make a correlation between an environmental impact and a plant’s reaction,” says Fernanda.

Since the static nature of single observations can give a misleading or incomplete picture, Fernanda’s team is integrating live crop, weather and soil data through mobile sensors in the field with the aim of producing constant phenotypic information. “This will provide new insights into the interaction between the genotype and the environment. This in turn will help to accelerate the detection of wheat genotypes better suited to cope with drought.”

A young farmer in her wheat field in India.

Managing the tsunami of phenotyping data

Although a plant breeder’s work should be simplified and made more efficient by combining molecular-breeding technologies with advanced phenotyping techniques and protocols, the reality is not necessarily so easy.

There are many steps to the plant-breeding puzzle, all of which produce data. The more advanced the techniques and – in the case of wheat – the more complex the plant’s genome, the more pieces of data breeders need to sift through to find solutions.

Before the Wheat RI started, Richard saw that this impending tsunami of data was going to be a problem in both China and India: “Both countries had the skills to carry out these advanced techniques, but they didn’t have in place a strong culture of data management.”

This problem is by no means unique to China and India, Richard says: “Most of the time, plant breeders keep a log of all their data in a book or Excel sheet. However, these data often get lost once a project is completed.”

GCP recognised this problem before the RIs began and has, since 2009, been developing the Breeding Management System (BMS) – a suite of interconnected software designed to manage the mass of data – as part of its Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP).

“The BMS is the first tool that can help breeders record and collate their data in a coordinated way,” says Richard. “This is vital in a project like this, which has several institutes across three countries working towards a similar product.”

Vinod agrees with Richard, adding that the BMS was relatively easy for his Indian partners to learn and use: “The BMS is great as we have no way of losing data.”

Rolling out the BMS in China, though, has been more difficult due to the language barrier. Ruilian explains: “We are now working towards translating the IBP, but it will be an ongoing challenge as the platform continually changes and is updated.”

Ruilian is optimistic that a translated BMS will become a viable tool for Chinese breeders in the future. “The more that we collaborate with other countries, the more a tool like this becomes important to have.”

Watch Richard on adoption of IBP tools in the video below.

Friendly competition helping inspire India’s wheat breeders

Vinod credits two things for the successful development of new wheat varieties and integration of new breeding techniques and data-management systems: a clear, logical plan and friendly competition between China and India to breed the first new drought-tolerant varieties.

“The initial plan, which Richard helped develop in Montpellier, was logical and well thought out. Although we initially thought it was overambitious in its objectives, we have been able to meet them so far, which is a great credit to the team and their enthusiasm to try these new technologies and see for themselves the benefits first hand.

“What has also helped is our competitive spirit, as we would like to achieve the objectives before the Chinese breeders do. Our breeders are always asking me for updates on how China is progressing!” Vinod adds, with a chuckle.

Ruilian agrees with Vinod’s assessment, adding: “The project would not have been as successful if it was solely national. It needed the international collaboration and friendly competition to help build confidence and drive.”

For Richard this international collaboration, between two very different and proud cultures, allowed the project to broaden its scope and troubleshoot quicker than usual.

“They [the Chinese and Indian researchers] think about problems in different ways. When you get a group of people in a room from different backgrounds, you can come up with great integrated plans, things you would never have come up with within just a national team,” says Richard.

Watch Richard on the beauty of diversity in research partnerships in the video below.

Securing wheat production into the future

With the project concluding in 2015, both the Chinese and Indian researchers are working towards completing national trials and releasing their new, advanced drought-tolerant varieties to farmers and other breeders. However, for Richard, the impact of the Wheat RI may not be fully recognised for 10–20 years.

“The initial new varieties that both China and India develop will help farmers in the short term. However, as both countries become more advanced in using the technology, future varieties are sure to be more and more robust. What’s more, these techniques and tools are sure to filter through to other national wheat-breeding programmes, as well as to other crops.”

In the case of wheat, new drought-tolerant varieties will help secure both China’s and India’s wheat industries, helping to stabilise wheat yields, and consequently prices, the world over. These new varieties may not be the silver bullet for eliminating the risks of drought, but they will go a long way to mitigating its impact.

Donkeys bring home the wheat harvest in Qinghai, China.

Niaba Témé and the sunrise for sorghum in Mali

Africa, Capacity building, Researchers, Sorghum No Responses »

Mar 102015

Niaba Témé

“I can’t talk enough about the positive stories from the Generation Challenge Programme [GCP]. It initiated something new. I cannot measure its benefits for my country, for myself and for the sorghum-breeding and -producer communities. Right now, GCP has reached its sunset; but for me it is a sunrise, because what we have been left with is so very important.”

Growing up in a farming community in Mali, on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, plant breeder Niaba Témé knows the ups and downs of farming in the harsh, volatile semiarid regions of Africa.

“I used to love harvesting the millet and helping my mother with her groundnut crops,” he remembers fondly. “We grew other dryland crops too, like sorghum, cowpeas, Bambara nuts, sesame and dah.”

Niaba’s village of Yendouma-Sogol is one of many villages balanced along the edge of the Bandiagara escarpment – 150 kilometres of sandstone cliffs soaring hundreds of metres above the sandy plains below. The region is considered one of the most challenging places in the world to be a farmer. The climate is harsh, with the average daily temperature on the dry, sun-scorched plains rarely falling below 30°C and often exceeding 40°C during the hottest months of the year. With no major water source available for drinking, cropping and livestock husbandry, the threat of drought is ever-present here, as it is across much of Africa’s semiarid landscape.

While much of Mali’s irrigated agriculture relies on water from the River Niger, villages like Niaba’s depend entirely on the 500 or so millimetres of rainfall they receive during the July–August wet season. In the years that the rains didn’t come, Niaba’s family were unable to harvest anything at all. The repeated failure of his parents’ crops – coupled with a natural interest in science – inspired Niaba to embark on a career where he could help farming families like his own defend themselves against the risks of drought and extreme temperatures.

Farmland in Diouna, Mali. Farmers here must contend with the Sahel’s dry, sandy soil and whatever limited rainfall the clouds bring to grow sorghum, millet, maize, and other crops.

Niaba’s journey

Niaba’s first big step along the research road was when he enrolled to study agronomy at Mali’s Institut Polytechnique Rural de Formation et de Recherche Appliquée in Eastern Bamako. Within two years he was offered a scholarship to study plant breeding at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India. He then worked at the Cinzana Research Station in Mali.

Niaba later spent 11 years in the USA completing a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and finally PhD in agronomy at Texas Tech University before returning home to Mali in 2007, where he was soon recruited by Mali’s Institut d’Économie Rurale (IER) to take charge of their new biotechnology lab at the Centre Régional de Recherche Agronomique.

His journey with the Generation Challenge Programme began in 2010 when IER received GCP funding to carry out sorghum research in Africa as part of GCP’s Sorghum Research Initiative (RI) launched that same year. The project was a collaboration with ICRISAT and France’s Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (Agropolis–CIRAD; Agricultural Research for Development). With an initial focus on Mali, the project’s results would expand to encompass five other countries in the Sudano-Sahelian region: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger and Sudan.

Sorghum the survivor gets even tougher

Hand milling of sorghum grains – an arduous task, mostly carried out by poor women in the drylands of Africa.

Drought-hardy crops such as sorghum are ideal for Mali’s conditions, where more water-intensive crops such as maize simply cannot survive. Millions of poor rural people across Africa depend on sorghum in their day-to-day lives: it is eaten in many forms, used to make alcoholic beverages and as animal fodder, and is converted into biofuel for cooking.

But even sorghum has its limits. While the demand for it has doubled in West Africa in the last 20 years, productivity has generally remained low, with an average yield of only one tonne per hectare for traditional varieties in Mali. This is mostly due to post-flowering drought, poor soils and farming conditions, and limited access to quality, high-yielding seed. As rainfall patterns become increasingly erratic and variable across the world, scientists warn of the need to improve sorghum’s broad adaptability to drought, to ensure future food security in Africa.

The GCP Sorghum RI, with Niaba’s help, aimed to support the development of new breeds of sorghum that could survive better on less water in drought-stricken parts of Africa. It sought to improve sorghum yield and quality for African farmers and, in turn, improve the livelihoods and food security of communities across sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2012, Niaba found himself travelling once again, this time to Australia with IER colleague Sidi B Coulibaly. They spent three weeks working alongside, and training with, Andrew Borrell and his sorghum research team at the Queensland Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s (DAFF) Hermitage Research Facility in Warwick.

“We have been collaborating with researchers at DAFF and The University of Queensland since 2009, to introduce what is called the ‘stay-green’ drought-resistant gene into our local sorghum varieties,” says Niaba.

Left to right: Niaba Témé with David Jordan (Australia), Sidi B Coulibaly (Mali) and Andrew Borrell (Australia), visiting an experiment at Hermitage Research Facility in Queensland, Australia.

Niaba’s no longer green when it comes to using stay-green

Stay-green is a drought adaptation trait that allows sorghum plants to stay alive and maintain green leaves for longer during post-flowering drought. This means the plants can keep growing and produce more grain in drier conditions. It has contributed significantly to an increase in sorghum yields, using less water, in north-eastern Australia and southern USA for the last two decades.

GCP’s stay-green project aimed to evaluate the potential for introducing stay-green into Mali’s local sorghum varieties, enriching Malian pre-breeding material for the trait, and training African sorghum researchers, such as Niaba, in the methods of improving yields and drought resistance in sorghum breeding lines from both Australia and Mali.

A sorghum farmer in Mali.

“In Australia we learnt about association mapping, population genetics and diversity, molecular breeding, crop modelling using climate forecasts, and sorghum physiology,” says Niaba.

Learning to use molecular markers was particularly exciting, he says, “because molecular markers make it easier to see if the plant being bred has the gene related to drought tolerance, without having to go through the lengthy process of growing the plant to maturity and risk missing the trait through visual inspection.”

Niaba says the molecular training he received in Australia complemented previous training he had received through a collaborative GCP-funded project with Agropolis–CIRAD and Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, in which he learnt to use molecular markers to identify and monitor key regions of sorghum’s genome in consecutive breeding generations through a process called marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS).

A large part of GCP’s focus is building such capacity among developing country partners to carry out crop research and breeding independently in the future, so they can continue developing new varieties with drought adaptation relevant to their own environmental conditions.

“Our time in Australia was an intense but rewarding experience, more so for the fact that between the efforts of Australia and Mali, we have now developed new drought-tolerant crops which will enhance food security for my country,” says Niaba. “Similarly with the help of Agropolis–CIRAD and Syngenta, we are using molecular markers to improve breeding efficiency of sorghum varieties more adapted to the variable environment of Mali.”

Niaba (foreground) examining a sorghum panicle at trials in Mali in 2009.

Sorghum sunrise in Mali

On the back of the MARS project, Niaba successfully obtained GCP funding in 2010 to carry out similar research with Agropolis–CIRAD and collaborators in Africa at ICRISAT.

“In that project, we were trying to enhance sorghum grain yield and quality for the Sudano-Sahelian zone of West Africa using the backcross nested association mapping (BCNAM) approach,” explains Niaba. “This involved using an elite recurrent parent that is already adapted to local drought conditions. The benefit of this approach is that it can lead to detecting elite varieties much faster.”

The approach has the potential to halve the time it takes to develop local sorghum varieties with improved yield and adaptability to drought. The project developed 100 lines for 50 populations from backcrosses carried out with 30 recurrent parents. The lines are now being validated in Mali.

Agronomists inspect a field of sorghum in Mali.

Niaba says such successful collaborations and capacity development opportunities have been made possible only through GCP support.

“We had some contacts before, but we didn’t have the funds or skills to really get into a collaboration. Now we’re motivated and are making connections with other people so we can continue working with the material we have developed.

“GCP’s time may be ending, but it very much represents a new day – a sunrise for the work we are doing with sorghum here in Mali.”

GCP Sunset Blog