Notice: the seminar will be in the lecture room in the greenhouse basement , Rolighedsvej 21 (not in øvelsessal 1)!Predictive link between crop traits and ecoclimatic description of the original collecting site.
Dag Terje Filip Endresen
Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen), Alnarp, Sweden
Biodiversity includes a rich diversity of different species adapted to a wide range of ecological conditions. Populations of species adapted to a subset of the species habitat are called ecotypes or ecospecies. Typically ecotypes show distinct phenotypic properties in response to their spesific ecological environment. Traditional crop cultivars can be seen as the agricultural equivalent of the ecotypes in wild species. Crop plants have evolved in response to the ecoclimatic and agricultural environment as human civilization developed and spread out across the planet. This phase of spread and adaption to new ecological conditions and new agricultural practizes resulted in a very large genetic diversity represented by distinct landraces of the crop species and has steadily progressed during the last 10 000 years. Modern plant breeding has reversed this steady increase in crop genetic diversity by the development of uniform modern high yielding cultivars outcompeting the diverse mosaic of previous landraces grown in the farming landscape around the world. During in particular the last fifty years this alarming effect of genetic erosion in the cultivated crops became increasingly more visible resulting in the systematic collection and conservation of the previous crop genetic diversity represented by the disapearing landraces. Under the coordination of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) a network of international and national genebanks were established based on the model of the Russian Institute of Plant Industry located in Saint Petersburg (initiated in 1894 as the Bureau of Applied Botany).
These collections of crop genetic resources are today a valuable source of new genetic variation for economically important traits, including resistance to crop diseases. New sources of useful crop traits are often identified through evaluation in field trials, some of which may require special treatments such as inoculation for screening purposes. This has tremendous implications as it incurs costs. Further, the number of relevant accessions in genebank collections available to be evaluated for a specific trait is often substantially larger than the capacity or resources of the evaluation project. Thus, finding the genebank accessions most likely to posses the desired trait can be compared to searching for a needle in a haystack. The Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) is an approach used to select subsets of germplasm from genetic resource collections in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of capturing a spesific trait at a higher frequency than if the subset had been selected at random. Michael Mackay originally proposed this subset selection strategy in 1990. Michael Mackay and Kenneth Street developed the strategy further in 2004 including the official naming as Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS).
The FIGS strategy uses a range of methods to link the expression of a specific trait (of a target crop) with the ecogeographic parameters of the original collection site. The results from a number of recent studies using the FIGS approach show that the climate layers from freely available ecogeographic databases are well suited to model and predict the reaction in these crops to biotic stress traits and other economically valuable crop traits. This result has the potential to improve the efficiency of field screening trials to find novel sources of economically valuable crop traits.
