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Agriculture and yield potential

Sometime around 10,000 years ago, our first hunter-gatherer ancestors began to get involved in agriculture.  Each year the early farmers collected the best seeds and grew them with the best field practices (of course, hoping for ideal weather) in order to improve their production and feed their relatives.

This simple approach can defined as yield potential. Yield potential is the maximum yield of a specific crop in a particular environment, when all the causes of stress are efficiently controlled. Increasing genetic yield potential - the amount of production that a plant has been genetically programmed to produce if all conditions are perfect - is an important response to addressing the 2050 global food security challenge.

I am part of the Photosynthesis Group at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, which aims to increase yield potential by improving photosynthesis: the process by which plants turn sunlight into carbohydrates. My research focuses on exploring whether distance relatives of wheat can provide new sources of genetic variation in photosynthetic efficiency which can be bred into elite wheat plants for cultivation. To do this, I am phenotyping new lines of wheat - to get the traits that offer better regulation of Rubisco, an enzyme which plays an important role in photosynthesis, and improve water use efficiency.

 

Wheat breeding requires a revolution.

"There are no miracles in agricultural production,” said Dr. Norman Boulaug, the father of the Green revolution. It needs global collaboration, combining the best agronomic practices and scientific improvements if we are to meet the 2050 food security challenge. This collaborative approach was behind the establishment of the International Wheat Yield Partnership (IWYP) funding body, which is supported by national research councils from around the world and leading wheat breeding companies.

Wheat is a staple crop providing 20% of calories and protein globally. Despite this, it is not very profitable for breeding companies to research wheat, because of its elaborate genetic makeup. So stable external finance is needed.

Plant scientists from the Lancaster Photosynthesis group have been provided with this steady funding by IWYP. I recently had the good fortune, through my postdoctoral research, to visit the IWYP Hub in Obregon (Mexico) for the second time. The IWYP HUB provides spaces to try out, under field conditions, the novel wheat material developed through IWYP-funded research. One such space is in the Yaqui Valley, Obregon, Mexico. I went there -alongside 20 other researchers from around the world - to do my research.

Obregon and CIMMYT, the cradle of the green revolution

Obregon smells of wheat breeding. Obregon is agriculture intensification. Obregon where the Green revolution started, is the home of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). CIMMYT is a world reference centre in wheat improvement. CIMMYT has invaluable genetic resources. Almost half the world's wheat land is sown with varieties that come directly or indirectly from its research, according to one of its own reports. It is also very sunny, so a good place to study photosynthesis.

Collaboration, as the field-work strength.

I came to IWYP Hub in Obregon to lead a small group working on a novel phenotyping for Rubisco regulation - the first time it had been tested in the field. Our aim was to unravel the role of leaf morphology (shape and structure) on photosynthesis, under direct and diffuse daylight.

I have a strong memories of our first meeting in Obregon where all the  visiting researchers tried to explain our research in a concise and straightforward way to the whole CIMMYT Physiology group, who are people to work with if your aim - or your future work dream - is to improve wheat yields. IWYP provides an attractive environment for fruitful cooperation. I had the opportunity to work with world experts Drs. Richard Richards, Gemma Molero, Tom Williams, alongside Erik Murchie’s PhD student Chun Foo.

Field-work is a synonym for leaving our comfort zone.

Richard Richards, the father of drought resistant cultivars, told us that one of the key lessons from his years of breeding is that plants do not wait for you. They grow and develop all the time: they don't adapt to your timetable, you have to adapt to theirs.  Breeding work requires perseverance, dedication, and calmness.

We discovered the truth of this immediately. Obregon is meant to be sunny nine days out of ten, but during the six weeks of my visit, half the days were cloudy and raining. So we decided to adapt our experiment to take advantage of the cloudy days, comparing which genotypes were more adapted to full sunlight and which to low light.

We worked hard to collect as much leaf plant material from different wheat populations as we could as quickly as possible, to make sure they had been exposed to the same light during the same period of time. We wanted to correlate Rubisco regulation with yield for these populations, some of which had been selected for high photosynthesis and some for different leaf shape. When I left, other members of my group continued collecting samples. 

The opportunity to discuss with other researchers, while seeing, touching and feeling wheat in the field is undoubtedly another highlight. We were encouraged to aim to be the best in our area of work, irrespective of our discipline, and to feel proud of the work of all the group: this ambition remains fresh in my mind.

However, I cannot fool you, there were also many stressful situations that have definitely changed my performance. Importantly, I have returned to Lancaster fascinated with the complexity of a crop, where a single plant is interacting with others around it, and that spatial arrangement of each plant is associated with yield. I am looking forward to analysing all my samples!