On a first trip to Hawaiʻi, most visitors might be content soaking in the volcanic coastline or sipping a cup of Kona coffee. But for Professor Rex Bernardo — who spoke today at the National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB) meeting in Kona, Hawai’i as a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award — the islands offer something more elemental: a chance to reflect on a lifetime spent deep in the hidden ecosystems of genetic diversity — what plant breeders call germplasm.
A son of the Philippines and now a professor and endowed chair in corn breeding and genetics at the University of Minnesota, Bernardo has dedicated his career not to conquering nature, but to collaborating with it. His path — part academic, part accidental explorer — has taken him from backyard sweet potatoes in the tropics to frozen vaults of maize seed in the American Midwest. And along the way, he’s developed a philosophy that might sound surprisingly simple: You gotta have it. You gotta use it. You gotta talk about it.
But “it” isn’t just any crop gene or variety. It’s exotic germplasm — the wild, diverse, and often unruly relatives of our modern crops. To Bernardo, these are not just scientific curiosities; they are the lifeblood of tomorrow’s agriculture.
The Cultivar Triangle
In the soft-spoken cadence of a lifelong teacher, Bernardo begins with a visual metaphor. Plant pathologists, he reminds his audience, have a “disease triangle”: pathogen, host and environment. Remove one, and the disease can’t happen.
He proposes a new triangle — this one for cultivars. To develop new-and-improved plant varieties, three elements must align: resources, breeders, and germplasm. Field plots, drones, greenhouses, and funding form one corner of the triangle. Skilled teams of breeders and collaborators form another. But at the triangle’s base lies germplasm — raw, living biodiversity. Remove any one corner, and the whole effort collapses.
“Today,” Bernardo said from the podium in Kona, “we’re focusing on that foundational leg of the triangle — the genetic material itself.”
A Sweet Potato Lost to History
Bernardo’s journey with exotic germplasm began not in a high-tech lab, but in a garden. As an undergraduate in the Philippines in the 1980s, he was drawn to a sweet potato unlike any other: short, bushy, and compact. In a country of rambling vines, this one stood upright like a sentinel.
It was unusual. It was exciting. And then it was gone.
He’d planted it in a shared garden. No sign. No label. One week later, it had vanished — weeded out by an unsuspecting gardener. “I should have put up a sign,” he laughs now. “At the very least, I should have taken more cuttings.” The lesson: preserving exotic germplasm isn’t glamorous, but it is essential. And it’s fragile.
Seeds With No Country
Some of Bernardo’s most tantalizing discoveries came not through fieldwork but through mysterious packages. One petri dish held kernels of “Korean High Oil” corn — germplasm that contained nearly six times the usual oil content. Its origin: North Korea, passed along informally by a South Korean adjunct professor.
The kernels were extraordinary. But the university’s legal department said: hands off. No material transfer agreement, no commercialization. Today, the seeds sit in a cold room, frozen in potential.
“I’m waiting for institutional memory to fade,” he jokes. But the point is serious: having germplasm isn’t enough. You need the paperwork. The partnerships. The infrastructure.
A Global Web of Resistance
Though he’s quick to point out that his own work with exotic germplasm is “eclectic, not systematic,” Bernardo’s story is laced with encounters that highlight its global importance.
There was the Sub1 gene, from an Indian landrace of rice, that allows plants to survive underwater for days — vital in a monsoon climate. There was Striga-resistant sorghum in Africa, bred to resist a beautiful but deadly parasitic weed. And then there was the Fhb1 gene in wheat — resistance to Fusarium head blight, one of the most devastating cereal diseases, originally found in a Chinese landrace.
All of these breakthroughs came from “non-elite” sources — wild relatives, landraces, and forgotten cultivars. To Bernardo, they are a testament to what lies just outside the margins of what breeders typically work with.
Breeding with Algorithms
While many of his peers toil in greenhouses, Bernardo has increasingly worked in the digital frontier. In 2009, he proposed using genome-wide selection to speed up introgression of exotic genes into elite lines — a method that combines traditional breeding with the predictive power of algorithms.
He tested it on “short corn” — a dwarf form of maize meant to be grown like wheat, in dense fields. It didn’t become a commercial blockbuster. But it showed that breeders could cross the wild with the domestic and, using genomic prediction, keep the best of both worlds.
The Power of Talking Plants
Bernardo’s third principle — you gotta talk about it — is perhaps the most radical. For too long, he argues, scientists have buried their stories in jargon and journals. But plants? Plants are magic. “People don’t want to hear about parasites,” he quips. “But plants? Plants are beautiful.”
At the University of Minnesota, he’s used everything from coffee to sweet corn to connect the dots between plant breeding and the public. He teaches a wildly popular course on coffee that covers its agronomy, supply chains, roasting and cultural history. He helped launch a breeding program for leafy African vegetables — connecting immigrant communities to the flavors of home. And he even developed a maroon-and-gold sweet corn called GopherCorn, in homage to his university’s school colors. It has zero commercial value, he jokes, but maximum outreach potential.
“I’ve had more meaningful conversations about agriculture because of that corn than any research paper I’ve written,” he says.
