USA
August 20, 2012

“Sustaining Life Through Plant Improvement” formed the theme of this year’s joint annual meeting of the National Association of Plant Breeders and Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee held in Indianapolis, IN. from August 6 to 8. In keeping with their pattern of alternating public/commercial annual meeting hosts, this year's host was Dow AgroSciences. Nearly 200 public and commercial professionals and student attendees presented and discussed innovations, progress and the challenges now facing the industry.

David Stelly, incoming president of NAPB and professor at Texas A&M University, summed it up this way: “How can we adequately provide food, feed, clothing, structural materials, fiber, fuel and many other plant-derived items for 2,000,000,000 more people (9,000,000,000 overall) in 40 years, with less high-quality land, less water, less fertilizer, less predictable weather and a domestic infrastructure for plant breeding research and education that has been seriously weakened by decades of breeding program eliminations and repeated reductions in base support?”

A sense of urgency, challenge and opportunity permeated the meeting and discussions. “Baseline resources for remaining plant breeding research and education programs need to be shored up immediately, as decades are required to rebuild programs once they shut down,” said Stelly. “New technologies empower breeders to be more effective, but years will nevertheless be required to breed well-adapted new crops. Adequate resources must be infused into public breeding to assimilate new technologies, and re-invigorate the plant breeding education and research infrastructure to the levels needed to face future challenges.”

This year's meeting reflected the organizations' reach across diverse plants, from hardwoods to corn. Topics cut across all aspects of plant breeding research, technologies, education and public relations, from in-the-field operations, to molecular genetics, intense computational analyses and public relations videos.

Education was a focus in several sessions, as there exists a strong need for well-educated and fieldcapable plant breeders. “One of the main things that came out of the discussion was that hands-on experience is essential for plant breeders,” says Allen Van Deynze, chair of PBCC and researcher at the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences. “People coming out of PhDs aren’t necessarily job-ready—they might not have the soft skills that are necessary for plant breeders working in a global industry.”

Other sessions showcased members’ new and ongoing research projects. Past NAPB/PBCC career award winner Dr. James Brewbaker gave a talk on tropical plant breeding of corn and tropical legumes in a Hawaiian context. Dr. Tom Gradziel of UC Davis addressed marker-assisted selection in perennial crops. Dr. Leah McHale (Ohio State University) gave a talk on soybean breeding and genetics, addressing the question of how the public breeder should work in a privately-driven crop, and leveraging genomic sequence.

Key to the meeting was a focus on the future and goals to be met in the coming year. According to Van Deynze, an important goal of the NAPB is to continually improve the messaging around plant breeding. “One NAPB goal is to get the message out to the USDA and to Washington [that they should] invest more into plant breeding, and the importance of plant breeding to food security.”

This year’s conference was hosted by Dow AgroSciences in Indianapolis.

The Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee serves as a forum regarding issues and opportunities of national and global importance to the public and private sectors of the U.S. national plant breeding effort.

The National Association of Plant Breeders was begun as an initiative of the Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee and is the advocacy group that represents plant breeders in federal, state, commercial and non-government organizations.

Website: http://www.plantbreeding.org

Published: August 21, 2012