Lumen Waite 100 - Flipbook - Page 23
When Professor Jason Able casts an eye back on history,
he is humbled by the work of his predecessors.
“Plant breeding is an art and science,” says the distinguished plant breeder and Head of the University of Adelaide’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine. “One hundred years ago, it was probably considered more of an art
because it was very visual. That’s all you could go by because that’s all we understood at the time. Thinking back to
100 years ago, we didn’t even know what DNA was.”
Plant breeding underpins humankind’s survival. It allows us to grow plants for specific purposes, such as the
production of food, fibre, timber and other products. In
fact, we have staff like Jason to thank for some of the durum wheat present in San Remo pasta products, and barley varieties used to make beer for the likes of Coopers.
Among staple crops that contribute to global food security, wheat and barley are particularly important in Australian agriculture.
well,” he says. Next, he references the ‘Father of genetics’,
Gregor Johann Mendel, who came up with a set of laws of
inheritance in 1865.
Mendel was a German-Czech biologist and meteorologist who tracked the segregation of parental genes and their
appearance in the offspring as dominant or recessive traits
using pea plants. He paved the way to our understanding of
genes coming in pairs and being inherited as distinct units,
one from each parent.
“Through Mendel’s foundation in the laws of inheritance, we began to understand that we have contributions
from two parents that then get passed on to the progeny –
just like us, as human beings,” Jason says. “That knowledge
informed modern-day plant breeding.”
Then came the discovery of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent Green Revolution of the 1950s and ’60s, spearheaded by the likes of American agronomist Norman
Borlaug. This paved the way for assigning a genotype to a
phenotype and mutation breeding using chemicals or radiation, resulting in significant yield improvements.
“For example, our breeding activities during the period
of 2002 to 2016 contributed to 17 cereal varieties being
commercially released that have been, and still are being,
grown by farmers,” Jason says. “Just between 2011-2016,
the total value of grain produced from those 17 varieties
alone was approximately $4.6 billion.”
“Suddenly, we were able to start thinking about understanding the genetic makeup within one variety versus another variety – what makes one variety better compared to
another,” Jason says.
When Jason considers the history of plant breeding,
though, he casts back beyond the last century. “Plant domestication happened around 12,000 years ago, well before Egyptian times. Back then, they were probably subconsciously selecting for better looking plant varieties that grew
The fourth foundational pillar was the design of molecular plant-breeding technologies. This includes marker-assisted selection, transgenic plants (which first occurred in
1983), genome editing, sequencing of whole genomes, and
the ability to regenerate and clone new plants in vitro.
This picture courtesy University of Adelaide.
LUMEN
