Germlines, Diversity, and Climate Change

 James MacAskill

British Canadian Institute of Technology Ontario, Canada

Keywords: diversity, genetics and plant breeding, climate change.

Abstract: The current conference’s focus on these pressing issues facing the global ecosystem is timely. The role of plant breeding in response to changing climates must be researched and practical endeavours focused on harnessing new technology for:

  • food security;
  • production of viable varieties for a protected set of climatic parameters from the 2040s onward;
  • to shorten the period between the discovery of suitable varieties and their commercial exploitation;
  • to make affordable seed stocks available to countries living on the margins of climatic change;
  • to embed new production methods that retain soil structures, embed natural nitrogen cycles, and preserve moisture in soils through different tilling methods;
  • preservation and growth of pollinators.

Mendel’s discovery of 1866 set out the basic parameters for the genetics of heritable traits. Subsequently, a revolution in the understanding of plant breeding has taken place. First through the classical plant breeding approach of cross-pollination to produce new varieties with different traits. Second, the understanding of dominant and recessive alleles has enabled plant breeders to have a more considered approach in the methods they used to plan the traits they wished to transfer to the offspring of a breeding programme. Third, these discoveries were later interpreted as functions of chromosomes and subsequently our understanding of gene loci. Fourth, the discovery of DNA and its role in templating the combination of amino-acids into an organism’s genome allowed a greater understanding of the fundamental shift in the application of technology to allow gene mapping and recombinant DNA production. The production of new varieties through a novel combination of the heritable traits and indeed the insertion of alien traits into varieties of plants was now possible.
While the laboratory bench techniques have allowed controlled changes to be made, it has proved rather harder to accelerate the time to produce manageable quantities of seed in commercially viable quantities. My first role in biotechnology, with Agricultural Genetics limited in the 1980s brought together the newest forays in monoclonal antibody production, cell continuous flow cell culture, and gene insertions together with traditional plant breeding. This was one of the first venture capital-backed companies seeking to revolutionize plant breeding; forming new recombinant combinations for designer crop protection agrichemical sprays; new plant varieties with resistance to these new synthetic agrichemicals. Thus, the whole world of plant breeding had been potentially changed forever. The aggressive use of intellectual property in the form of plant breeders’ rights became core to the commercialization of new plant varieties as did the production of sterile F1 hybrid varieties to maximize the commercial value of seed and prevent re-use of seed from harvest to harvest. It was now possible to insert alien genes from insects into plants as natural insecticides to convey disease resistance to certain insects came into sight.
The growing demand for food from a rapidly expanding global population led to the investment into the production of drought-resistant varieties, low nitrogen tolerance, salt-tolerant varieties, and disease-resistant varieties. In contrast, the impact on the natural growing environment was largely ignored: traditional farming practices, tilling techniques, and practices, rotations, use of fertilizers etc. It was also established that while modern technology could shorten the development time of new varieties with potential benefits, did not always accelerate the growing phase successfully and often proved difficult. Traditional plant breeding, even, with its long production cycles often produced more stable and reliably produced commercially viable seed stocks of new varieties.
While the markers used to monitor the transfer of new genes were very often the same traditional measure of traits associated with grain yield measured through ear height and plant height, used in conventional plant breeding. Importantly, these new genetic markers allow new approaches to plant breeding and increase the screening opportunities through data mining of the libraries of genetic markers to improve the rapid selection of candidate genes.
It is well reported that two major issues are affecting the global ecosystem at present:

  • loss of diversity of plant and animal species;
  • climate warming and consequently the changing climate’s impact on insect and plant species and pollination risk.

There is now a general moratorium on gene manipulation and only the brave continue to introduce alien species’ genes into an organism. Now, a more traditional view of augmenting traditional plant breeding by using genetic markers from natural and more ancient stock, to monitor and assess the potential augmentation of these new combinations and varieties.
Thus, plant breeders can now incorporate these molecular markers identified in inbred and wild lines of plant varieties to offer cheap and reliable measures of diversity that are independent of the growing environment and developmental stages.
Climate fluctuations have been with us for thousands of years forcing dramatic changes in the terrain and cultural practices in gathering and producing food. Yet these changes occurred over thousands of years. The climate change debate evolves around the speed of change. Speed of change is the major threat to the world as we see it today. Plants can evolve given time as can pollinators. However, the mismatch in climate changes to plants and pollinators’ ability to evolve in the same timelines is extremely challenging.
Understanding the genome of plants has offered us a link to the past as well as to the future. Harnessing knowledge about tied up in these genomes may provide the answer to plant breeding in the future through novel wild variety traits or inbred traits not currently dominant in varieties today.
These approaches may have a significant impact on future varieties’ tolerance to:

  • climate change and its consequences;
  • stability of such variants;
  • unknown risk to future food security.

In conclusion, the rapid development of recombinant DNA genomic information and the availability of data mining tools for identifying potential climate change-resistant traits will greatly enhance the discovery of new plant varieties going forward. However, fundamental challenges will still be faced in the nature and culture of farming practices that will need to change in parallel with climate change. It appears the ability to think globally about climate change, may in the end be achieved only through acting locally.
This will require a very significant human change to the food we eat, the origin and food miles required to supply food, and the threats posed by globalization in an unstable world, economically and socially. National self-sufficiency must be a goal of this genomic revolution to allow developed and less developed nations to survive climate change and provide time for these new climate tolerant varieties to take root. Then, and perhaps only then will it be possible to feed the world. Consequently, the real need to feed your national population will provide a new perspective on the role of plant breeding research and the risk of over-extended supply chains promoted through globalization.
The current conference and the papers presented offer an insight into some of the research techniques and technologies available in Romania. The focus on the fundamental challenges of generating new plant varieties in response to global climate change is clearly rehearsed in the participants’ research.