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How to create a successful crop research partnership: the Generation Challenge Programme

By | Blog, GPC Community, Scientific Meetings

The Generation Challenge Programme (GCP – not to be confused with GPC!) was enthused about repeatedly during the three day GPC/SEB Stress Resilience Forum held in Iguassu Falls, Brazil. This 10-year program was created by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 2003 as a collaborative approach to developing food crops with improved stress resilience, and is widely hailed as a very successful example of the benefits of international collaboration and practical targeted research funding.

Dr Jean-Marcel Ribault, director of the GCP, spoke at the meeting about the success of the $170 M program, and the key things that other projects should consider when designing collaborative partnerships.

Generation Challenge Programme

Research initiatives

During its second phase (2009–2014), the GCP focused on seven key research initiatives: improving cassava, rice and sorghum for Africa’s drought-prone environments; improving drought tolerance in maize and wheat for Asia; tackling tropical legume productivity in marginal land in Africa and Asia; and the use of comparative genomics to improve cereal yields in high aluminum and low phosphorus soils.

GCP Research Initiatives

The GCP acted as an international umbrella organization, distributing grants to fund research across different types of organizations (CG centers, universities and National Programs), either as commissioned projects or competitive funding calls. The aim was to bridge the gap between upstream research and applied crop science, enabling the development of markers and tools that could be of direct benefit to breeders and farmers in developing nations.

Ribault described one of the success stories of the GCP that highlighted the power of international collaborations working together on a problem to benefit people around the world. A team at Cornell University, working alongside Brazilian scientists, won a competitive grant to investigate aluminum (Al) tolerance in sorghum. They discovered a major gene responsible for Al tolerance by growing different accessions of sorghum in hydroponic systems, and began to breed tolerance into Brazilian sorghum cultivars through a commissioned project. The Brazilian team, with the support of scientists from Cornell, took on leadership to transfer these Al tolerant alleles to Africa, where they were also used to improve germplasm for Kenya and Niger.

An ongoing legacy of knowledge

The research funded by the GCP yielded many major research outputs, including a huge variety of genetic and genomic resources, improved germplasm and new bioinformatic tools to aid data management, diversity studies and breeding.

One of the most important parts of the GCP program was its support service component, a key part of which was the development of the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP), an amazing resource for crop breeders. The IBP was designed as a way to disseminate knowledge and technology, giving breeders in developing countries access to the latest modern plant breeding tools and services in a practical manner.

The IBP’s core product, the Breeding Management System (BMS), allows breeders to manage their breeding program, including lists of crop genetic stocks as well as pedigree and germplasm information and field designs. It provides functionality for electronic phenotypic data capture and statistical analysis, access to molecular markers, breeding design and decision-support tools, and more. Through the Platform, users can also access climate data, geographic information system (GIS) information, genotyping services at concessionary prices, training opportunities and other relevant breeding support services.

Integrated Breeding Platform

A legacy of the GCP, the IBP lives on for further development and deployment, thanks to a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (phase II, 2014–2019). Ribault hinted that dissemination of the platform will be more difficult than its development; indeed it can be challenging to change a person’s behavior and work practices, even if breeders see the benefits of using the IBP!

The keys to success

Throughout his talk, Ribault described how the partnerships formed by and within the GCP were an important foundation to the success of the program. These dynamic networks were based on trust and on an evolution of responsibilities, and many of the partners have continued to work together after the GCP ended in 2014.

Working on projects around the world was not always easy, Ribault explained, but it meant that the results arising from the research were directly relevant to the agricultural practices in those countries, and therefore more likely to be used.

MYC students

Photo credit: IB-MYC Students – Ramzi Belkhodja/IAMZ

One of the most innovative approaches of the GCP was to dedicate around 15–20% of its budget each year to capacity development, which included holding workshops and training sessions, as well as funding studentships and fellowships to ensure future sustainability of the research projects. One novel practice was to run multi-year breeding courses, where participants were expected to bring along the outputs of their research each year. Anti-bottleneck funding was used to alleviate the problems that people were facing by providing much-needed resources or access to technology; Ribault highlighted this as one of the most important drivers of GCP’s success.

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If you’d like to read more about the Generation Challenge Programme, please visit the GCP website.

If you’d like to read more about the Integrated Breeding Platform, please visit the IBP website.

Making Plant Genomics Front Page News with an Emblematic Genome Project: The Bauhinia Flower

By | Blog, Future Directions
Keep Calm.

Bahunia is the national flower of Hong Kong, GigaScience is launching a crowdfunding campaign to learn more about the biological and genetic history of this flower.

By Scott Edmunds, Executive Editor, GigaScience Journal

‘Big Data’ is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our lives, and we at GigaScience are big fans of approaches democratizing its utility through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. With much mistrust and fear of genetic technologies there is also a huge need to educate and throw light on “what goes on under the hood” during the process of genomic sequencing and research.

After helping promote community genome and microbiome projects such as the Puerto Rican “peoples parrot”, Azolla Genome, Kittybiome, and the community cactus (previously highlighted in the Global Plant Council Blog), the team at GigaScience has finally decided to launch our own.

Inspired by our Hong Kong home, this month we’ve launched an exciting new crowdfunding project to help learn about the enigmatic biological and genetic history of the beautiful symbol of Hong Kong: the Bauhinia flower.

Hong Kong’s emblem is the beautiful flower of the Hong Kong Orchid Tree Bauhinia x blakeana: it is mysterious in origin, and lovely along the roadside and in any garden. Being used as a food crop in India and Nepal, Bauhinias are actually a legume rather than an orchid, and while a transcriptome has been sequenced as part of the 1KP project (Bauhinia tomentosa) no species of the genus has yet had its genome sequenced.

A Brief History of Bauhinia blakeana

It was first discovered in the 1880’s by the famous horticulturist Father Jean-Marie Delavey

The Bahunia flower

The Bahunia flower is the symbol of Hong Kong

growing on a remote mountainside in Hong Kong, but how it got there is a mystery – especially since it is sterile. The missionary collector subsequently propagated it in the grounds of the nearby Pokfulam Sanatorium, and from there it was introduced to the Hong Kong Botanic Gardens and across the world. Originally described as a new species in 1908, it was subsequently named after the Hong Kong governor Sir Henry Blake, who had a strong interest in botany. We have an opportunity to get a glimpse into this fascinating history by carrying out a crowdfunding project to determine its entire genetic make up.

In addition, it’s a project we are trying to get everyone involved in: from gardeners to botanists, historians to photographers, university researchers to school children – really, anyone interested in being a part of Hong Kong’s First Emblematic Genome Project and understanding the biological secrets of this unique flower.

Plant Genomics for the Masses

Teaming up with BGI Hong Kong and scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, this new crowdfunding project will use one of the best techniques to help uncover the secrets of any living being: genomic sequencing. While the cost of sequencing has crashed a million fold since the human genome project, plant genomes are still challenging. While Bauhinia have a relatively small genome (0.6C), being a hybrid means it will be very challenging to assemble using current short-read technologies. To get around this we are having to sequence the two likely parents first, pushing the reagent costs that we need to cover through crowdfunding up to about $10,000. Studies using individual genetic markers have shown that the species is likely a hybrid of two local species, Bauhinia variegata and Bauhinia purpurea, but this has yet to be confirmed at a genomic scale.

Genome sequencing is also one of the key technologies defining the 21st century, and a field in which Hong Kong has made major advances (for example in BGI Hong Kong’s giant sequencing capacity, as well circulating DNA diagnostics), though more effort is needed to engage and inform the general public.

Through sequencing the genome of our emblem to better understand where it came from; this will help to train local students to assemble and analyze the data – crucial skills needed for this field to advance; and engage and educate the public through local pride. Outreach and awareness-building is key, and we have already managed to get plant genomics and Bauhinia onto the front cover of the SCMP Sunday Magazine and on Hong Kong radio.

 

You can also access the YouKu version of the above video here.

Get involved!

The project seeks a variety of things from the community: at its most basic level, help in the form of donations can be provided at the project’s website. As a community project no contribution is too small, so please contribute via the crowdfunding page.

Furthermore, we’ll be carrying out community engagement and citizen science in the form of Bauhinia Watch, where people in the community can inform researchers about sightings of the flower and its relatives, and look for the hypothesized very rare individual plants that may produce seeds. Photographs along with location information are especially desired, and can be shared with the global community on social media (use the #BauhiniaWatch hashtag).

Also, getting involved in educating the community is key. The project’s website, in addition to explaining the science behind the project, provides information for identifying the different Bauhinia species, which can be fun for curiosity driven individuals of any age. Now is the time! Bauhinia blakeana is in peak flowering season in Hong Kong from November to March.

Moreover, this is a great opportunity for creating school projects, to learn about botany, evolution, the latest scientific technologies, and to participate in the research or carry out fundraising to join the Bauhinia community.

This will be the first Hong Kong genome project: funded by the public; sequenced in Hong Kong; assembled and analyzed by local students; and directly shared with the community.

Being Open Data advocates, all data produced will immediately be shared with our GigaDB platform, and all methods, analyses and teaching materials will be captured and made open to empower others to carry out similar efforts around the world.

Bauhinia Genome welcomes contributions and interest from across the globe, hoping this serves as a model to inspire and inform other national genome projects, and aid the development of crucial genomic literacy and skills across the globe; inspiring and training a new generation of scientists to use these tools to tackle the biggest threats to mankind: climate change, disease and food security. We have already collected enough money to fund the transcriptome, and the next goal is to get enough funds to start sequencing the genomes of the family members. To enable us to do this support us through our crowdfunding site, like us on Facebook or twitter, and help spread the word.

For more information and to support the project visit the website and crowdfunding page. follow us on Twitter @BauhiniaGenome, or on Facebook, and include the hashtag #BauhiniaWatch for any news or pictures you’d like to share on social media.

 

Bauhinia Postcard

GPC/SEB Stress Resilience Symposium: online tools for stress resilience research

By | Blog, GPC Community, Scientific Meetings
© Lisa Martin

Iguaçu Falls © Lisa Martin

Lisa Martin reports on the GPC’s recent Stress Resilience Symposium and Discussion Forum in Brazil, and highlights some of the brilliant online tools that are available to scientists working in this area.

It’s a strange thing to be packing for 38ºC weather while the temperature at home in England steadily plummets towards 0ºC. Nevertheless, leaving a cold and rainy London behind, Team GPC took to the skies on 21st October and touched down in tropical Foz do Iguaçu, a resort town on the Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay border.

Iguaçu is best known for its spectacular UNESCO World Heritage waterfalls, but we – that is myself, Executive Director Ruth Bastow, and our two New Media Fellows Amelia and Sarah – were in town for three different reasons. As well as attending the International Plant Molecular Biology conference, followed by the GPC’s Annual General Meeting, we were also running a Stress Resilience Symposium in collaboration with the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB), on 23rd and 24th October.

The intention of this Symposium was to bring together experts from around the world to discuss current research efforts in developing plant stress resilience, to showcase new approaches and technologies, and build new networks and collaborations. Our goal is to help contribute to global efforts to develop crops and cropping systems that are better able to deal with fluctuating and stressful environmental conditions.

Food Security Challenges

After a welcome from the new GPC President Professor Bill Davies (Lancaster University, UK), the Symposium got started with a session focused on how scientists are helping to overcome existing and emerging barriers to food security.

Speakers included Matthew Reynolds, who gave an overview of the crops and climate change research at CIMMYT in Mexico; Lancaster’s Martin Parry, who described his group’s work to translate findings in Arabidopsis to capture more carbon and improve the water and nutrient use efficiency of crops; and Bob Sharp from the University of Missouri (USA), who spoke about trying to understand root responses to drought.

As well as hearing from Matthew Gilliham (University of Adelaide, Australia), and Sarah Harvey (University of Warwick, UK), Jean-Marcel Ribault from CGIAR in Mexico described the collaborative approach to developing food crops, with stress resilience in mind, being taken by partners involved in the Generation Challenge Program (GCP, not to be confused with GPC!).

The ultimate aim of this program, Jean-Marcel said, is to improve the germplasm in farmers’ fields, focusing on research on six staple crops, the integration of data management, and building capacity for the future.

IBPnewlogo_0To help with the ‘integration of data management’ arm of the project, the GCP consortium has developed the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP). As well as providing access to many different germplasm resources and diagnostic markers, central to the IBP’s offering is the Breeding Management System, “a suite of interconnected software specifically designed to help breeders manage their day-to-day activities through all phases of their breeding programs. From straightforward phenotyping to complex genotyping, it provides all the tools you need to conduct modern breeding in one comprehensive package”.

iplant_logoThe IBP is hosted on the cyberinfrastructure provided by the iPlant Collaborative, which, in case you’ve never heard of it, provides free and open access not only to high performance computing power via virtual machines, but also to a huge range of user-friendly, largely user-generated software for biological data analysis. Quick plug: you can find out more about it by reading this JXB paper I wrote with my former colleagues at the UK Arabidopsis research network GARNet…:-)

Improving stress tolerance in variable environments

shutterstock_65739844The session after lunch took a closer look at some specific stress-related challenges. Drought tolerance was a popular topic, with Andrew Borrell of the University of Queensland (Australia), Vincent Vadez from ICRISAT, and INRA’s François Tardieu all presenting work in this area. Scott Chapman also provided some insights into the modeling work going on at Australia’s CSIRO, which is helping crop breeders to decide which traits to focus on to adapt to different sources of stress. He mentioned QuGene, a tool available via the Integrated Breeding Platform, which is simulation software to investigate the characteristics of genetic material undergoing repeated cycles of selection and molecular marking.

downloadIn presenting her work on understanding aluminium toxicity and tolerance in rice, Lyza Maron from Cornell University (USA) introduced us to the Rice Diversity Project, a collaborative effort to explore the genetic basis of variation in rice and its wild ancestors. The Rice Diversity Project website (www.ricediversity.org) hosts a large number of freely available data sets for different rice lines, and a number of tools developed during the project are also made freely available, including a genome browser, a genome subpopulation browser, a seed photo library viewer, and other pieces of analysis software that you can download.

Innovating for Stress Resilience

In the next session, we heard about some exciting projects being carried out across the globe that are advancing our understanding of stress resilience in plants. Chile’s Ariel Orellana gave a fascinating talk about mining the genome of Cystanthe longiscapa, a flowering plant native to the extremely barren and dry Atacama desert; Elizabete Carmo Silva from Lancaster University talked about high-throughput phenotyping in the field, China’s Xinguang Zhu demonstrated some quite stunning 3D models simulating cell structures, water and metabolite movement in the leaf; and potato root architecture was the theme of the presentation made by Awais Khan from the International Potato Center in Peru.

Speaking about the part her lab played in the PRESTA project, Warwick’s Katherine Denby showed us some of the complex, intricate transcriptional network models used to predict, test and reveal interactions between genes involved in Arabidopsis’ defence against Botrytis cinerea. Source code for the WIGWAMS tool, which was specially created to help analyse multiple gene expression time series data, is available here.

Short poster talks

At the end of a fascinating day of fantastic science, we heard some short talks from up and coming researchers whose posters had been selected for an oral presentation: make sure to look up the awesome work of rising stars Elizabeth Neilson from the University of Copenhagen, Nicolas Franck from Universidad de Chile, Cristina Barrero-Sicilia from Rothamsted, and our very own Amelia Frizell-Armitage from the John Innes Centre!

Day 2 – the discussion forum

StressResAttendeesBut the Stress Resilience Symposium didn’t end there… The next day a smaller group of invited experts returned to the meeting venue for some in depth discussion and debate. The aim of the day was to prepare the ground for a forthcoming GPC report, which will highlight the specific challenges facing plant science in terms of developing stress resilient crops and cropping systems, and outline some potential solutions that the plant science community – and those beyond it – can initiate to meet these challenges.

After hearing some presentations about successful large-scale, international projects such as DROPS, IDuWUE, IWYP and others, attendees split off into breakout groups to discuss what they felt to be the key challenges facing stress resilience research today, and the areas in which plant scientists around the world need to come together to mitigate these challenges. Unsurprisingly, this session was lively and animated, with several differences of opinion, but each thought was a valuable and useful contribution to the assessment of the global landscape. Participants talked about the current regulatory climate, particularly surrounding GM and gene edited crops; the need for silos of knowledge to be linked and shared, and for effective technology transfer to make sure that the science we do in the lab has impact in the field – and in the fields where that science is most needed.

After a long but fruitful two days of great science, effective knowledge and ideas sharing, the Stress Resilience Symposium ended with a team photo and further opportunities for “networking” by the hotel pool (or for the Australian participants among us, the Argentina vs. Australia Rugby World Cup Semi Final!). The GPC is now compiling an official report, based on the discussions at the meeting, which we hope will provide a powerful and realistic call to action for stress resilience scientists across the globe to come together. Watch this space!

Thanks to Oliver Kingham and Paul Hutchinson from the SEB, Professors Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston and Jim Beynon from the University of Warwick, Professor Bill Davies from Lancaster University and Andrew Borrell from the University of Queensland for their help in making this symposium possible.

applications and tools

The Global Plant Council Guide To Social Media

By | ASPB, Blog, Future Directions, GPC Community, Plantae, SEB

Here at the GPC we love social media. It provides a fantastic platform upon which we can spread awareness about our organisation and the work we do. Since Lisa Martin’s appointment as Outreach and Communications Manager in February of this year, and the New Media Fellows two months later, we have expanded our online presence and are reaching more people than ever before. We still have a way to go, but here are a few things we’ve learnt over the past year that might provide you with a bit more social media know-how.

  1. Tweet, tweet, and tweet some more

To increase your following as an individual try to produce maybe one or two good tweets everyday. If you’re tweeting on behalf of an organization and have more time or people power, 5–8 tweets a day should be your target.

Global Plant Council twitter account

The Global Plant Council twitter account now has over 1500 followers. Find us @GlobalPlantGPC

Our Twitter following has grown rapidly over the past year. We had 294 followers on Twitter in September 2014 and now have over 1500! Much of this has been down to there now being four of us maintaining the account rather than Ruth Bastow (@PlantScience) on her own.

The more you tweet, and the better you tweet, the more followers you will get. Things move fast in the Twittersphere, so just a few days of inactivity can mean you drop off the radar.

For more hints about using Twitter see this great article from Mary Williams (@PlantTeaching): Conference Tweeting for Plant Scientists Part 1 and Part 2.

  1. If your followers won’t come to you, go to your followers

Decide on who you want to connect with, find out which social media platform they se most, and set yourself up!

As a global organization we want to connect with all our members and plant scientists around the world, so we need to use different means of communication to do this. In April 2015 we set up a Spanish language Twitter account with Juan Diego Santillana Ortiz (@yjdso), an Ecuadorian-born PhD student at Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany, who translates our tweets into Spanish.

Of course Twitter is not universally popular, and our main following seems to come from the

Scoopit

The newest edition to the GPC social media family is our GPC Scoop.It account which you can find here

UK and US. To connect with those choosing to use different communication platforms, New Media Fellow Sarah Jose set up a GPC Scoop.It account in September 2015. Around this time we also set up a GPC Facebook page after many of our member organizations told us this was their primary means of connecting with their communities. Although relatively new, this page is slowly gaining momentum and we hope it will provide a great outlet for conversation in the future. Find out about which of our member organizations are on Facebook here.

If there’s a site you use to stay up to date with science content that we don’t have a presence on, do let us know and we will look into setting up an account!

  1. Generate your own content

Ultimately, the best way to expand your reach online is to generate your own content.

The GPC blog was started in October 2014, and in its first 14 months of life received an average of 142 views per month. However, since Lisa, myself and Sarah started working with the GPC, we have been generating one blog post every week, with the result of our monthly views shooting up to almost 700 views per month since May.

This just shows that generating interesting and regular content really does work in terms of increasing reach and online presence. All these blog posts have also contributed towards a growing following on our various social media sites over the past six months.

If you want to write for us, please send us an email or get in touch on Twitter! We are always looking for contributions from the plant science community. Perhaps you’ve recently attended a scientific meeting, are doing a really cool piece of research, organized a great outreach activity or have seen something relevant in the news. Whatever it is, we want to know.

We’re also happy to write about the GPC for your blog or website, so if you would like us to contribute an article, please get in touch!

  1. Cover as many platforms as possible

Try to have a global presence across as many platforms as you think you can maintain, although an inactive account on any social media site won’t do you any favors, so don’t take on too much!

I’ve already described our presence on Twitter, Facebook, Scoop.It and the blog, all of which help make our organization accessible, however people want to use social media.

In addition to this we of course have the GPC website, and Lisa sends out a monthly e-Bulletin providing a summary of all the information published on the website for that month. Anyone can sign up here to stay up to date with our activities, and it’s free!

In a bid to further reach out to members that perhaps don’t engage with social media (yet!), Lisa wrote this article explaining what the GPC does and sent it out to be published by our various member organizations.

  1. Plantae
New Media Fellow Sarah Jose promotes our new Plantae platform at IPMB 2015

New Media Fellow Sarah Jose promotes our new Plantae platform at IPMB 2015

Confession time, this isn’t really a helpful hint on how to use social media, but Plantae is so good it deserves a section all on its own!

We are hoping Plantae, set up by the GPC in collaboration with the ASPB, and with support from the SEB, will be the digital ecosystem for the plant science community. It will provide a platform for plant scientists to collaborate with one another, network, and access journals, advice and jobs. You can read more about Plantae on our blog, here.

It’s now in beta testing and you can sign up to give it a go at http://www.plantae.org. Let us know what you think!

GPC AGM: Another exciting year of innovative collaborations

By | ASPB, Blog, GPC Community, Plantae

The content of the Global Plant Council’s Annual General Meeting was summed up by outgoing Chair Professor Wilhelm Gruissem’s opening remarks: “We have made a lot of progress and accomplished many things, but we still have much work to do”. With many exciting initiatives in the works, the GPC AGM looked back at a year of success and forward to even greater things to come.

GPC AGM 2015 attendees

The GPC AGM 2015 attendees

The meeting, held in Iguassu Falls, Brazil, brought together representatives from many of the 29 member organizations to discuss the progress made on the GPC initiatives in the past year.

                         

plantae                                                         

Plantae.org

Plantae promo!

Plantae promo!

The GPC has been working with the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) to create Plantae.org, a digital ecosystem for the plant science community. It will serve as a resource hub and networking platform, with news, information, funding and job opportunities, educational materials and outreach resources all in one place. For more information, read GPC Outreach and Communications Manager Lisa Martin’s post about Plantae here.

If you would like to register to become a beta tester for Plantae and give valuable feedback on the way the system works, sign up at www.plantae.org. Plantae is due for full release in 2016.

 

Educational resources

We also teamed up with the Gatsby Charitable Foundation’s Plant Science Tool for Research-Engaged Education (TREE), an online teaching tool providing everyone with inspirational educational resources from the research community. Thanks to our international members, the GPC has begun to translate these resources into other languages to make them more accessible to lecturers, teachers and students around the world.

A big thank you to GPC intern Maura Di Martino, Professor Edith Talensik (Argentinean Society of Plant Physiology/Sociedad Argentina de Fisiología Vegetal, SAFV) and Marília de Campos (Portuguese Society of Plant Physiology/Sociedade Portuguesa de Fisiologia Vegetal, SPFV), who translated four free-to-access TREE research lectures into Italian, two into Spanish and two into Portuguese.

We’ve also collaborated with the popular Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, run by the ASPB, to translate materials into Portuguese with the help of Drs Nelson Saibo, Ana Paula Santos and Professor Cândido Pinto Ricardo of the SPFV.

 

DivSeek

DivSeekRGBDiversity Seek (DivSeek) is a community-driven, science-based initiative that aims to unlock the potential of crop diversity stored in seed banks around the world. It is jointly facilitated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (FAO), the CGIAR consortium, and the GPC.

During 2015, over 50 partners came together to officially launch DivSeek and bring together large-scale genotyping and phenotyping projects, computational and data standards projects. Our aim is to establish DivSeek as a common umbrella to connect and promote interactions between these activities and establish common state-of-the-art techniques for data collection, integration and sharing. This will improve the efficiency of each project by eliminating redundancy and increasing the availability of data to researchers around the world. Read more about the project here.

In connection with the DivSeek initiative, the GPC is conducting a landscaping survey of large-scale genotyping and phenotyping projects linked to crop diversity around the world. If you’re involved in a project of this type, which we might not know about, please get in touch!

 

Biofortification

Malnutrition is a major global problem that may be tackled in part by the development of crops with improved nutritional value. There are several international projects underway attempting to do just that, and the GPC’s Biofortification initiative was established to act as an advocate for this research, identifying gaps in the current programs and liaising with key stakeholders to ensure major nutritional needs will be met by a coordinated approach.

Last year’s GPC Biofortification Forum meeting generated a set of 10 recommendations, which has been drafted into a white paper and will be finalized by the end of the year. This document has already drawn attention from a number of stakeholders interested in working with the GPC.

 

GPC New Media Fellow tells the AGM about the GPC blog!

GPC New Media Fellow tells the AGM about the GPC blog!

 

Stress Resilience

Just a few days before the GPC AGM, we teamed up with the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) to hold a Stress Resilience Forum in Iguassu Falls, Brazil. The event brought together experts from around the world, representing a diverse range of research organizations. The three-day meeting generated a lot of exciting discussion which will be translated into a forthcoming report, establishing GPC as an integrator and facilitator in the field of stress resilience in crops.

 

Welcoming our new Executive Board

From the 1st November 2015, we welcomed a new Excutive Board to provide leadership and strategic direction for the GPC:

Chair: Barry Pogson, Australian Society of Plant Scientists

Vice-Chair: Ariel Orellana, Chile’s National Network of Plant Biologists

Treasurer: Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston, Society for Experimental Biology

Board Member: Carl Douglas, Canadian Society of Plant Biologists

Board Member: Yusuke Saijo, Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists

 

Thanks for a great year!

The GPC team

Thanks to all from the GPC team! From left to right: Ruth Bastow (Executive Director), Amelia Frizell-Armitage (New Media Fellow), Sarah Jose (New Media Fellow) and Lisa Martin (Outreach and Communications Manager).

 

Stress Resilience: Call for papers for a JXB Special Issue!

By | Blog, GPC Community, Scientific Meetings, SEB

GPC banner Without linkFollowing the recent Stress Resilience Symposium and Discussion Forum that we co-hosted in Brazil last month with the Society for Experimental Biology, we are pleased to announce a call for papers for a forthcoming Special Issue of the SEB’s Journal of Experimental Botany.

Achieving food security in a changing and unpredictable climate urgently requires a better understanding of the mechanisms by which plants interact with and respond to their environments. This special issue will bring together a collection of papers highlighting the best current research in stress resilience contributing to global efforts to develop crops and cropping systems that are better able to deal with fluctuating and stressful environmental conditions.

Proposals are invited for the submission of new and innovative research papers that contribute to this goal (submission before the end of January 2016 will guarantee inclusion in the special issue pending positive peer review). Confirmed contributors already include: Andrew Borrell (University of Queensland, Australia), Elizabete Carmo-Silva (Lancaster University, UK), Scott Chapman (CSIRO, Australia), Bill Davies (GPC President and Lancaster University, UK), Lyza Maron (Cornell University, USA), Jianbo Shen (China Agricultural University), and Roberto Tuberosa (University of Bologna, Italy).

If you would like to contribute a paper, please email a title and short abstract to Mary Traynor: m.traynor@lancaster.ac.uk.

Taking Care of Wildlings

By | Blog, Future Directions

By Hannes Dempewolf

We at the Global Crop Diversity Trust care about wildlings! No, not the people beyond The Wall, but the wild cousins of our domesticated crops. By collecting, conserving and using wild crop relatives, we hope to be able to adapt agriculture to climate change. This project is funded by the Government of Norway, in partnership with the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew in the UK, and many national and international research institutes around the world.

The first step of this project was to map and analyze the distribution patterns of hundreds of crop wild relatives. Next, we identified global priorities for collecting, and are now providing support to our national partners to collect these wild species and use them in pre-breeding efforts. An example of a crop we have already started pre-breeding is eggplant (aubergine). This crop, important in developing countries, has many wild relatives, which we are using to develop varieties that can better withstand abiotic stresses and variable environments.

More recently we have started a discussion with the crop science community on how best to share our data and information about these species, and genetic resources more generally. This discourse that was at the heart of what has now become the DivSeek Initiative, a Global Plant Council initiative that you can read more about in this GPC blog post by Gurdev Khush.

Why should you care?

Good question. I couldn’t possibly answer it better than Sandy Knapp, one of the Project’s recent reviewers, who speaks in the video below.

One of the great leaders in the field, Jack Harlan, also recognized their immense value: “When the crop you live by is threatened you will turn to any source of relief you can find. In most cases, it is the wild relatives that salvage the situation, and we can point very specifically to several examples in which genes from wild relatives stand between man and starvation or economic ruin.”

Oryza

Wild rice, Oryza officinalis, is being used to adapt commercial rice cultivars to climate change. Photo credit: IRRI photos, used under Creative Commons License 2.0

Crop wild relatives have indeed been used for many decades to improve crops and their value is well recognized by breeders. This is increasingly true also for abiotic stress tolerances, particularly relevant if we care about adapting our agricultural systems to climate change. One such example is the use of a wild rice (Oryza officinalis) to change the flowering time of the rice cultivar Koshihikari (Oryza sativa) to avoid the hottest part of the day.

Share the care

Fostering the community of those who care about crop wild relatives is an important objective of the project. We make sure that all the germplasm collected by partners is accessible to the global community for research and breeding, within the framework of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the ‘Plant Treaty’). The project invests into building capacity into collecting: it’s not as simple a process as it may sound. The following shows the training in collection in Uganda:

We also put a heavy emphasis on technology transfer and the development of lasting partnerships in all of the pre-breeding projects we support.

The only way we can safeguard and reap the benefits of the genetic diversity of crop wild relatives over the long term is by supporting a vibrant, committed community.  We hope you agree, and encourage you to get in touch via cropwildrelatives@croptrust.org.

To find out more about the Crop Trust and how you can take action to help conserve crop diversity for food security, please visit our webpage. For more information about the Crop Wild Relatives project, please visit www.cwrdiversity.org.

 

Biofortification

By | Blog, GPC Community

Approaches to biofortification

Biofortification is the improvement of the nutritional value of our crops through both traditional breeding and genetic engineering. Alongside DivSeek and Stress Resilience, biofortification is one of the Global Plant Council’s three main initiatives and will be central to addressing many of the challenges facing world health. However, biofortification doesn’t always involve changing our crops in some way. Often the nutrients we are lacking are present in pre-existing crops. We can biofortify our diets simply by identifying what’s missing and altering our life style accordingly.

Tackling undernourishment

The share

The share (%) of undernourished people per country. From: Max Roser (2015) -‘Hunger and Undernourishment’. Published online at www.OurWorldInData.org

More often that not we intuitively link biofortification with tackling undernourishment in the developing world, and indeed improvements in the diets of deprived communities would be of enormous benefit to global health.

To do this, a key challenge is to increase the nutrient content of staple food crops such as rice in Asia and maize in sub-Saharan Africa. We need to do this in a sustainable and affordable way; ensuring foods are accessible to those who need it. Alongside the fortification of staple crops we need to identify economical crop species that will grow in harsh environments and provide nutrients currently absent from the diet.

Addressing obesity

It is easy to forget that malnutrition is also a problem in developed countries. Worldwide, at least 2.8 million people per year die from obesity-related illnesses, and in 2011 more than 40 million children under the age of five were overweight. Obesity and related health problems such as diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers, place enormous strain on health services, and are partly a function of poor diet lacking in fibre and key phytonutrients. Addressing this is as important as tackling undernourishment, and many of the same principles apply.

Simple lifestyle changes, such as encouraging the consumption of more fruits and vegetables, are clearly a priority. In addition to this dietary change, if we are going to biofortify foods, there should be an emphasis on crops that are already widely consumed.

Purple tomatoes

Professor Cathie Martin

Professor Cathie Martin works at the John Innes Centre researching the link  between diet and health, and how crops could be fortified to improve our diets and global health.

Tomatoes, are one crop plant already eaten widely in the West, commonly found in fast and convenience foods. For this reason they became the focus of the work of Professor Cathie Martin at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. Cathie’s lab has developed a genetically modified tomato that is rich in anthocyanins, making them purple in colour. Anthocyanins are an important dietary component that can have numerous health benefits, including a potentially significant role in the prevention of diseases such as cancer and diabetes. They are the compounds that give some foods, such as blueberries or eggplant, their distinctive blue or purple colouring. Consuming higher quantities could be highly beneficial to health.

“We focused on anthocyanins because of their huge potential health benefits. Pre-clinical studies show that introducing our purple tomatoes into the diet could be an incredibly effective way to protect against diseases such as cancer. Our next steps will be to confirm these findings in human trials,” says Cathie.

However, naturally occurring tomato varieties containing anthocyanins already exist. Wouldn’t it be better to increase consumption of these rather than creating new ones?

“Indeed purple tomatoes do occur naturally. However, these have anthocyanins only in the skin, in quantities too small to make a significant impact on health. Our genetically modified tomatoes have anthocyanins in all tissues,” explains Cathie.

Since developing the purple tomatoes, Cathie, in collaboration with Professor Jonathan Jones, has set up Norfolk Plant Sciences, the UK’s first GM crop company. However, resistance and uncertainty in Europe surrounding GM technology means that progress has been slow.

“The company was founded in 2007 and we are currently working towards the approval of our purple tomato juice in the USA. Producing just the juice rather than the entire fruit means there are no seeds in the final product. This eliminates environmental challenges without compromising health benefits. If the juice proves successful in the USA we may then work towards approval in the UK and Europe.”

It’s not all about Genetic Modification

Of course if we want to make drastic changes to our foods, such as increase anthocyanins in our tomatoes or carotenoids in our rice, GM technology will be a necessity. However, we can go some way to biofortifying our diets without the use of GM.

Golden rice

Golden rice, shown on the left, is a biofortified crop that accumulates high quantities of provitamin A in the grain. This could help tackle Vitamin A Deficiency in developing countries, from which 500,000 children become blind every year, and nine million will die of malnutrition. Photo credit: IRRI photos used under Creative Commons 2.0

Primarily we really need to focus on changing diet and lifestyle. Promoting plants rich in the nutritional components we need is essential, in addition to encouraging traditional diets such as the Mediterranean diet rich in fish, fruits and vegetables. However, changing people’s behavior and relationship with food is a huge challenge. Cathie cites the UK 5-A-Day governmental campaign as an example.

This campaign was aimed at encouraging people to eat five portions of fruit or vegetables a day. At the end of this 25-year campaign only 3% more of the UK population was getting their five a day.”

In addition to dietary change, we could biofortify our crops through traditional breeding. For example, one answer to increasing anthocyanins in the diet could be red wheat. Red wheat is rich in anthocyanins, and furthermore less susceptible to pre-harvest sprouting, which causes large crop losses every year for farmers. However, we have so far resisted selecting for this trait in wheat breeding programs as it is not considered esthetically pleasing. To improve our diets we may need to change our expectations of what we want our plates to look like.

Next steps

Plant scientists alone cannot tackle biofortification of our diets! Cathie believes the key to a healthier future is interdisciplinary research:

“Everyone needs to come together: nutritionists, epidemiologists, plant breeders, and plant scientists. However, with such a diverse group of people it is hard to reach agreement on the next steps, and equally as difficult to secure funding for research projects. We really need to promote collaboration and interaction between all groups in order to move forwards.”

Women in Plant Science, Part II

By | Blog, GPC Community, Interviews

Tuesday 13th October was Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) in honor of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer.

To highlight the achievements of women in STEM we’ve spoken to female plant scientists around the world about their careers and experiences. Read on for Part II of the series (for Part I, click here):

 

Professor Kalunde Sibuga

Professor Kalunde Sibuga

Professor Kalunde Sibuga

Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania

What are you working on?

I have always been interested in working with farmers who have limited resources and coming up with production technologies that can help reduce their workload (particularly for women) and dependence on purchased inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides and other pesticides. These interests led to a research career focusing on weed management and agronomy of legumes, vegetable crops and cereals.

 

Have you ever faced any specific challenges as a female scientist in Tanzania?

Not particularly, because policies in Tanzania encourage girls to go to school and do whatever they are able to do. Women in science in my country are not targeted for discrimination, but until recently, certain sections of science such as engineering were considered a male domain. The government aims for gender equality and funds various projects to encourage girls to take science subjects, which have assisted in increasing enrolment of girls in universities.

 

What are your hopes and goals for the future?

I have always believed that whatever we do, our aim should be to increase productivity, reduce drudgery and increase household income. This can only be achieved if governments, particularly African governments, would take a serious look at mechanization, timely delivery of inputs, marketing, and value addition aspects. Our work in agronomy is of no great benefit if the other components are not properly and appropriately addressed.

Weed Science and Management are not as well staffed as other branches of crop protection such as entomology and plant pathology. My goals for the future are therefore to continue to train and encourage young scientists to engage in weed research.

 

 

Associate Professor Siobhan Brady

Associate Professor Siobhan Brady

Associate Professor Siobhan Brady

University of California, Davis, USA

Could you give a brief overview of your research into root development?

My lab explores the development of root cell types, and the gene regulatory mechanisms and networks that are responsible for producing them. We are also interested in how different species and stresses have different networks in order to adapt to different environments. We love to utilize genome-scale data and systems approaches to understand how these systems are organized.

 

Have you faced any specific challenges as a woman in science?

Yes. Finding the right time to have a baby is one example. I ended up having my first child five months into my position as a PI and the experience was one of the most challenging in my life. I was trying to find my feet being a new mum at the same time as being a new lab leader, writing grants and teaching. I even felt “guilty” (purely self-imposed) for starting my position by having a baby and felt that I had so much to prove by being able to get this position at a time when getting faculty positions was incredibly challenging. I went back to work full time after six weeks. Nursing, working, and travelling was very hard, but I made it. I had the support of my partner and of an incredibly wonderful lab and colleagues. Looking back in fact, I wish I’d opened up to them a little more.

I now have two beautiful boys. I have had to cut some of my work responsibilities (for instance, picking and choosing which weekly meetings are really the most important to attend). It has changed our lives, but learning to be flexible (not always easy for me!) and finding the unique advantages in each challenge that faces us has been a tremendous learning experience.

 

What would you say is the general experience of women in science in the US?

So much better than it once was. When I started in science I knew of very few female faculty members with children. Now there are many more incredible mentors who have families, are very successful and maintain a good work-life balance.

That being said, given the current funding situation in the US and the general economy there are fewer and fewer faculty jobs available. Many graduate students and postdocs have presented their concerns to me that raising a family and having a successful career are inherently incompatible in this era – that is, that you will always be so busy that something will fail.

It is hard to figure out when to have children. If you have a grant, there is no allowance for your graduate students or postdocs to take leave, but you are mandated to take some leave (as you should be). This is a real challenge, both for PIs and for students/postdocs, as there is really only a limited amount of time to get a project done and to have a mother stay with an infant. I don’t know of a good way to handle this other than to always have open communication with people in your group and to let them know (if a PI) that you support them in their life goals, no matter what they are, while encouraging them to be the best they can be.

 

What are your goals for the future?

Raise happy, well-adjusted children, continue to train amazing scientists, learn different fields of research and ask new and creative biological questions. And of course, publish well and get funded sufficiently so that our work can make a difference in science and the world in general!

 

 

Thank you to both Professor Kalunde Sibuga and Associate Professor Siobhan Brady for taking the time to discuss their experiences with us.

Please leave a comment below and describe any challenges or opportunities you have observed for women in science in your country!

 

Women in Plant Science, Part I

By | Blog, GPC Community, Scandinavian Plant Physiology Society

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) in honor of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer.

To highlight the achievements of women in STEM we’ve spoken to female plant scientists around the world about their careers and experiences. Read on for the first of two posts:

Associate Prof Lum Fontem

Associate Professor Lum Fontem

 

Associate Professor Lum A. Fontem

University of Buea, Cameroon, and Women Representative of the African Crop Science Society.

 

Could you give a brief overview of your research?

I have always had the desire to carry out research that is oriented towards solving the problems of resource-poor farmers, which led me towards my areas of interest; weed science, agronomy, management of post-harvest losses and phytoremediation. I work with many crops, including cereals, legumes, vegetables, roots and tubers.

The major output of my work has been the adoption of technologies that have led to  an improvement of livelihoods, food security and increased household incomes.

 

Have you faced any challenges as a woman in science?

Occasionally I face the challenges that women go through because of their gender, but I have always stood my ground. My parents encouraged me to go to school and provided for my needs, and I won awards, all of which helped me to sail through smoothly.

 

What would you say is the general experience of women in science in Cameroon?

In Cameroon, the policy of gender equality has received a strong impetus from government and women are encouraged in the area of science, however there are still domains that women still have to break through.

 

What are your goals for the future?

I hope to train more weed scientists that can respond to the multifarious challenges of food production.

 

 

Professor Cornelia Spetea Wiklund

Professor Cornelia Spetea Wiklund

Professor Cornelia Spetea Wiklund

University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Council Member of the Scandinavian Plant Physiology Society.

 

What is the subject of your research?

My research focuses on the solute transport network from the thylakoid membrane of Arabidopsis thaliana. We also study the impact of mycorrhiza symbiosis on photosynthesis in the model legume Medicago truncatula.

 

How has your career progressed?

My PhD at the University of Szeged, Hungary, and postdoc at Stockholm University, Sweden, focused on the proteolytic mechanisms in thylakoid membranes during light stress. I moved to Linköping University, Sweden, where I got funding from the Swedish Research Council to build my own research group working on my current areas of interest. I have been a Professor of Plant Cell Physiology at the University of Gothenburg for the past 4.5 years.

 

Have you dealt with any specific challenges as a woman in science?

Of course. I gave birth to two children in my first years as group leader. The major challenge was how to manage my group and raise the children at the same time, even though my husband took over quite a lot of the family responsibilities. On one hand, I have become a very good ‘manager’ of my time, but on the other, I have missed a lot of my children’s development. Another challenge was to learn to understand how my male colleagues think and undertake management in science.

 

How does Sweden help women in science to succeed?

Sweden, as other Scandinavian countries, is known for a generous parental leave system, which allows the father to be at home for at least 60 out of 480 days. Day care is heavily subsidized by the state and accepts children over a year old.  These advantages allow many female scientists in Sweden to have children during their PhD or later on in their career. However, the ‘price’ may be that the young female group leaders with small children at home experience delays in their career development as compared with male colleagues of similar age.

A survey at my institution in Gothenburg revealed additional causes for delayed career success, such as poor networking and visibility of young females in various scientific forums. Remarkably, according to the same survey, there is not much difference in career development between senior male and female scientists.

 

What do you hope to achieve in the future?

I will continue my research on the regulation of photosynthesis since I find it fascinating and because I believe this can bring solutions to many of the problems with crop productivity within the context of increasing human population and depleted resources. I also aim to spend more time with my children at least in the coming five years, before they leave home to continue their studies.

 

Thank you to both Associate Professor Lum Fontem and Professor Cornelia Spetea Wiklund for taking the time to discuss their experiences with us.

Please leave a comment below and describe any challenges or opportunities you have observed for women in science in your country!