b'How did new technology play a role in the earlyto go through multiple generations. Its like days of your breeding career? a pregnancy; no matter what we do with all At AAFC Swift Current, from about the lateof our new medical interventions, pregnancy 1970s, we devoted about 10 per cent of ournormally is still nine months. Having said resources to new breeding technologies.that, there is what we called the acceleration Ron DePauw The computerization and mechanization ofof generation advancement, which becomes Science Advisor,the breeding program enabled us to handlekey to reducing time-to-market. The buz-SeCan larger segregating populations with morezword today is speed breeding, but it is A giant of the cerealdata. For example, at that time, people had aessentially the same thing. Once double breeding community,weigh scale, and they would put their samplehaploid technology and marker-assisted selec-Ron was the leadof grain on the weigh scale and then writetion arrived (which helped create Lillian and architect of andown the weight on a piece of paper, andCarberry CWRS spring wheats) we were able important new classthen enter it into something for data analy- to create markers closely linked with a certain of wheat and assistedsis. My colleague Tom McCaig developed angene which just took things to the next level.in the developmentinterface between the digital weigh scale and of numerous othera data capture device, so the information varieties of cerealcould be transferred automatically to a digi-crops. tal file that we could then analyze without having to do anything with a pen or a pencil. And of course, mechanization of plant breed-ing operations enabled us to handle much larger populationsabout 10 times thePROOF OF PERFORMANCE OF A number of individuals based on computeriza-tion and mechanization.SUPERIOR GENE COMBINATION CAN Another major change that occurred wasONLY BE DONE IN REAL-WORLD FIELDS.the new near-infrared (NIR) technology, which revolutionized what we could do to measure things like protein content and test weight very rapidly. NIR enabled us to select for grain yield and protein content simultane-ously. We developed statistical methods to select and shift that negative relationship of grain yield and protein content. We didntWhat do you think the future holds?break it, just shifted it as a result of betterBoth the common wheat genome and the water use efficiency and better nitrogen usedurum wheat genome have been sequenced. efficiency, thereby building better plants.Theres a lot of work going on to under-Some of the varieties that came out of thisstand what the functional part of all of this simultaneous selection for grain yield andDNA really is. At the same time, the cost of protein content were AC Barrie and AACgenotyping has really come down, making it Brandon CWRS wheat and Kyle, Strongfieldpossible to have a lot more genomic informa-and AC Navigator durum. These are all Seedtion at our disposal. Add to that continued of the Year varieties and are examples ofadvancement of computing power, high the use of all of these new technologies thatthroughput phenotyping, drones and imaging. came along that enabled us to build superiorIt all makes breeding by design possible.combinations of genes.However, all of these are merely tools to assist in the prediction of the superior gene That must have really sped things up for you. combination. Multi-location testing will still With NIR technology, you could do 60 orbe required. Proof of performance of a supe-more samples in an hour. It really was revo- rior gene combination can only be done in lutionary. But I think we have to be veryreal-world fields. Grain in the bin that can be much aware that wheat is a self-pollinatingprocessed to make nutritious food products at species, and a new variety must be homo- a profitable price to producers is going to still geneous and homozygous, so it breeds true.be foundational. Everything else, I would say, This is achieved by inbreeding, so you haveis predictive.NOVEMBER 2021 GERMINATION.CA 41'