South Perth, Western Australia
October 22, 2010
Research gains are being made to assist cereal breeders to develop more reliable lines that are tolerant to frost and cold.
To be able to breed such lines, breeders need to be able to identify and characterise breeding populations for suitable tolerance traits.
Department of Agriculture and Food research officer Ben Biddulph recently received a travelling scholarship from the Grains Research and Development Corporation to develop pre-screening techniques in collaboration with CSIRO Plant Industry to identify desirable tolerance traits.
Cuballing farmer Tom Wittwer, whose property the National Frost Characterisation trials have been carried out on over the past 3 years, and DAFWA research officer Ben Biddulph discuss frost susceptibility at booting when the crop is going through pollen meiosis at the Cuballing trial site, September 2010.
Dr Biddulph undertook laboratory experiments at the CSIRO in Canberra with principal research scientist Dr Rudy Dolferus, who has worked on identifying heat and drought tolerance traits during pollen development in wheat and rice.
The research examined the chilling or cold tolerance of 10 popular and experimental wheat varieties.
The aim was to see if they could find a correlation between cold tolerance under artificial conditions (1ºC) and frost susceptibility in the field (0.0 to -3.0ºC).
“The results showed that Wyalkatchem was the most cold sensitive of all the varieties, which corresponds to field frost data in Cuballing in WA (DAFWA) and Loxton in South Australia (University of Adelaide),” he said.
“This information can now be used to examine what impact frost and chilling events have on commercial germplasm at the critical plant development periods of pollen meiosis and flowering, when grain number and subsequent yield potential is determined.
“We are also testing these varieties in the field under natural frost conditions during pollen meiosis at the National Frost Characterisation site at Cuballing, the results of which should be known next month.”
Severe frost can cause yield losses of 50-100 per cent. In 2005, Western Australian farmers lost 700,000 tonnes of wheat to frost, and in 2008 frost damage cost the WA grains industry an estimated $109 million.
“In the short term by developing pre-screening methods to identify and characterise commercial germplasm we will be able to give farmers more confidence in their varieties. In the longer term we hope to be able to assist breeders in developing new varieties which are not as sensitive to frost,” Dr Biddulph said.
“There is also potential for these methods to be adapted to other environmental stresses which affect grain set, like drought, salinity and heat.”
Species
