Feeding the World Without Genetic Engineering

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GENETICALLY ENGINEERED PLANTS AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGY PLANT BREEDING

 

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The work of a Kansas State University professor is challenging the

assumption that genetically engineered plants are the great

scientific and technological revolution in agriculture and the only

efficient and cheap way to feed a growing population.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Newswise — The work of a Kansas State University professor is

challenging the assumption that genetically engineered plants are the

great scientific and technological revolution in agriculture and the

only efficient and cheap way to feed a growing population.

 

Jianming Yu, an assistant professor of agronomy, is teaming with Rex

Bernardo, a professor of agronomy and plant genetics at the

University of Minnesota, on research with marker-assisted selection.

This agricultural technology offers a sophisticated method to greatly

accelerate classical breeding through genetic analysis and selection

of existing natural diversity in various crops without having to

resort to alien species. Currently, marker-assisted selection has

been a routine in many private seed companies with large-scale

fingerprinting, global germplasm assessment and comprehensive

bioinformatics support.

 

Yu's and Bernardo's research is focused on breeding methodology,

finding more efficient ways to breed better varieties of corn,

sorghum, wheat or barley that yield higher, require less irrigation

and are resistant to diseases in farmers' fields. The pair's work was

recently published in an edition of the scientific journal Crop

Science.

 

" With abundant molecular markers that can be routinely processed with

modern genomic technology, we found it is more efficient to focus on

selection based information all across the genome rather than the

traditional way of genomic regions containing signals that pass a

threshold, " Yu said.

 

Their research is " a result of our constant deliberation of how to

incorporate modern genomic technologies into breeding process, a more

general term as genomic-assisted plant breeding, which differs from

what scientists have been doing -- using markers to guide the

introgression of single or multiple disease resistance genes, " Yu

said.

 

" The traditional way is to identify genome regions that show

significant information, " he said. " The new way is to consider all

information genomewide. In other words, we strategically shifted the

focus from finding the most interesting genome areas to considering

all information simultaneously. This is critical, especially given

that most of traits with agricultural importance are controlled by

many interacting genomic regions and their individual effects are

relatively small. "

 

Yu and Bernardo plan to conduct experiments with sorghum in Kansas

and maize in Minnesota.

 

" It will provide breeders, public or private, a powerful tool to

advance their breeding practices, " Yu said.