The 2010 Maize Genetics Conference started with a call for maize geneticists to take on one of the greatest challenges of human history – feeding the world. Marianne Bänziger of CIMMYT presented the first plenary talk, titled Stress tolerant maize for the developing world – Challenges and prospects. Find the abstract of her talk at the end of this post.

Of all of the staple grains, maize is the most drought susceptible. Wheat is fairly drought tolerant, and rice is irrigated. Maize is sensitive to variation in rainfall, and since it is typically not irrigated, any year to year variation in rainfall will be seen as year to year variation of yield, with low rainfall years yielding less than high rainfall years. There are some drought tolerant varieties that don’t have such variation with rainfall, but they are consistently low yielding, even in high rainfall years. In order to provide enough food for growing populations, maize must be developed that can maintain reasonably high yields even in drought years.

A second major problem with maize is nitrogen. Maize reacts well to fertilizer application, providing (to a point) higher yields with higher amounts of nitrogen. However, less than 50% of applied fertilizer is used by the plant, leaving much of the nitrogen unused This unused fertilizer can be carried via surface waters to places like the Gulf of Mexico where it can contribute to hypoxic zones. Additionally, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer can be expensive to produce because it requires natural gas. Both synthetic nitrogen and non-synthetic fertilizers take fuel to distribute through fields. Maize that can use applied nitrogen more efficiently without laving so much behind must be developed both in order to provide enough food and to ensure that we are using both renewable and nonrenewable resources efficiently while protecting the environment.

CIMMYT aims to solve problems of drought and nitrogen by breeding under stress conditions. Their fields look more like a field in Africa than a field in Iowa. They simply select for stress tolerant plants that grow successfully under low water and low nitrogen conditions. They’ve found that genetic markers in typical yield selected lines and in stress selected lines are very different. CIMMYT is also looking at breeding under low phosphorus and low potassium.

While CIMMYT is primarily focused on breeding, they believe the key to meeting future food needs lies in matching breeding and transgenics. In particular, CIMMYT has partnered with seed companies to develop transgenics that will enhance productivity. The current traits on the market are protective: Bt protects the crop plants from insect damage which can reduce yield, Roundup Ready protects the crop plants from having to compete with weeds for resources, and virus resistance protects papaya from reduced yield due to virus infection. Productivity traits would directly increase yield instead of protecting it. Castigiloni showed in the 2008 paper Bacterial RNA chaperones confer abiotic stress tolerance in plants and improved grain yield in maize under water-limited conditions that yield could be significantly improved with a transgene.

Finding appropriate transgenes that will improve yield isn’t the end of the story. Each transgene needs to be investigated for genotype x environment interactions to see if the productivity transgenes behave differently under different environmental conditions. In addition, the transgenes may behave differently in different varieties, so each individual variety would need to be tested for yield changes with the productivity transgene. More layers of complication are added when multiple genes of similar and different traits are stacked. The combinations of transgenes may behave differently than each gene alone, and the combinations may have different interactions with each variety and environment.

CIMMYT has partnerships with Monsanto to work on water efficient maize for Africa (WEMA) and with Pioneer to work on improved maize for African soils (IMAS) which is also known as nitrogen use efficiency (NUE). These partnerships have many benefits. They can combine CIMMYT germplasm which is adapted for the farming conditions of low-income farms with the elite germplasm held by the corporations. They can ensure that the poor can aces the seed at no cost or at costs they can afford. They can also depend on the companies to provide funding to develop and deregulate the traits.

Developing and using transgenics is not without barriers, of course. In short, transgenics are expensive. Developing a transgenic trait costs $25 to $100 million dollars or more. Costs include finding a gene that does what you want it to, testing efficacy of the gene in many different varieties and environments, safety testing to ensure that the transgenic plants are substantially equivalent to their non-transgenic sister plants, and so on. For the forseeable future, the cost of transgenic traits will remain high. For the price of one commercial transgenic cultivar, CIMMYT believes they can characterize the entire genetic heritage of the two principal cereal crops, wheat and maize.

During her talk, Marianne announced the new CIMMYT program Seeds of Discovery for the first time. This exciting program will examine ancestral varieties of maize and wheat to enable breeding programs globally to use crop biodiversity in developing new lines. They aim to discover the extent of allelic variation in these varieties. They also hope to better understand how the different varieties are related in core sets. Right now, varieties are organized by geographic origin or phenotype but grouping by genotype will allow for better explanation of genetic similarities and differences. When more is known about the allelic diversity in ancestral varieties, marker assisted breeding can be used to bring those rare useful alleles into breeding programs.

In addition to ancestral varieties, CIMMYT looks at farmers’ varieties. They have partners in 14 countries that are both looking for potential lines for breeding that have traits like drought tolerance and looking into how new traits will work with the varieties farmers are currently using. They are also looking into other traits that are important to farmers in the developing world, including taste and appearance.

Greater than 80% of the required yield grain has to come from breeding. No other method, including fertilizer and transgenic traits, will be able to come close to breeding. Making these increases requires scientists from the developed world and from the developing world to both form partnerships and to work on their own areas of expertise. Marianne called upon the maize genetics community to help characterize the genes and alleles that CIMMYT finds in their Seeds of Discovery program. They plan to provide seed to scientists so they can begin to investigate the traits.

Talk Abstract:

Increasing demands for the main food staples, climate change, and increasing water, nutrient and land costs give a new urgency to developing and making available stress tolerant crops. This urgency is the greatest in the developing world where investments in research, capacity building and infrastructure development still lag far behind the developed world. The presentation gives an overview of CIMMYT’s investment in the development of stress tolerant maize which has recently gained significant leverage through stronger research collaboration with public and private partners, and now extends from native and transgenic trait discovery to large scale application of marker assisted selection approaches tailored to the improvement of highly quantitative traits such as yield under drought and low soil fertility. Many years of CIMMYT research indicate that these traits are highly polygenic, which has implications for the use of transgenics, identification of effects within association mapping studies, and the choice of appropriate marker based breeding strategies. In addition to assessing front line transgenics originating from the private sector for use in particular in Africa, current efforts focus on marker assisted recurrent selection (MARS), which is being implemented in over 40 biparental populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Current MARS populations are selected on an index of 200 to 300 anonymous SNP markers, a density chosen because it is affordable with current genotyping technology. In 2010, pilot projects on the implementation of genomic selection (GS) using much higher marker densities will be initiated on new platforms based on next generation sequencing technologies, and it is expected that by 2011 genotyping costs will have dropped enough to permit their routine application across the CIMMYT maize breeding program and facilitate innovative native gene discovery and allele mining approaches. With that, CIMMYT is among the first public sector breeding programs that integrate cutting edge transgenic and molecular techniques on a large scale for germplasm development and dissemination to the tangible benefit of resource poor farmers.

Castiglioni P, Warner D, Bensen RJ, Anstrom DC, Harrison J, Stoecker M, Abad M, Kumar G, Salvador S, D’Ordine R, Navarro S, Back S, Fernandes M, Targolli J, Dasgupta S, Bonin C, Luethy MH, & Heard JE (2008). Bacterial RNA chaperones confer abiotic stress tolerance in plants and improved grain yield in maize under water-limited conditions. Plant physiology, 147 (2), 446-55 PMID: 18524876

Volker Brendel, professor of bioinformatics at Iowa State, spoke at the Maize Genetics Conference about the need for a better system of community annotation of the maize genome. The genome of the popular maize inbred line B73 is sequenced, but we don’t actually know what a lot of the code stands for. It’s going to take a lot of collaborative effort to discover and annotate (explain) the function of each gene and to put all of that information in one place so it will be useful.
Volker reminds us that the Arabidopsis 2010 funding is running out, so we need to assess the plant genetics situation. How many genes do we know the function of? There is still much to learn.
Maize is uniquely positioned to replace Arabidopis as a focus for basic plant research due to the many resources that are already established, the most important of which is the extensive maize genetics community (he didn’t say it, but there is another reason why maize is a better choice than Arabidopsis right now – all of our major grains are very closely related, so work on maize applies to rice, wheat, sorghum, and more). The community needs to work together in the annotation process, assigning functions to the genes that have been sequenced, putting the data from a variety of sources together to make a bigger picture. Each researchers has a favorite gene (pathway, organelle, etc) – how can each of the researchers contribute to the annotation process?
PlantGDB is a comparative genomics site funded by NSF has information on 14 species, including maize, which is very useful. However, no matter how clever the computer programs are, the human touch is still needed. Filling in information on any of these species helps us to better understand all of them. On the site, community members can flag genes for which the models don’t seem to fit, and can contribute alternative explanations. The final goal is to have every gene model approved by the relevant community member(s). When a person annotates a gene, the PlantGDB committee reviews it, approves it, and the information is shortly available on the site. Annotating the genes you are working on is your civil duty, something you owe due to public funding you receive.
After Volker’s talk, the attendees discussed what is the public’s role in the attenuation process should be. There are a lot of cases where the the gene model can be checked without any lab work, simply by looking at the sequences. Some members of the community think we should harness the brainpower of thousands of biology undergraduate students by assigning annotations for class. I like the idea of getting students involved, and hope they follow through.Diversity of people to represent the maize genetics community.
A panel discussion followed, where a lot of great new ideas for annotation were brought up (unfortunately I don’t have the names of some of the people that spoke).
One panel member said we need “Zeazomics” – a collection of information including genomics, metabolimics, proteomics, and whatever else we can come up with – to fill in gaps in our knowledge. being able to link all of this information together will lead to stronger explanations of the phenotypes we see. He said this process will not be definitive, it will create a series of hypothesis that will lead to more hypotheses. The hypothesis testing will lead to functional biolgoy, from physiology to biochemistry to cell biology and more. Additional genome sequencing is necessary to capture the entire diversity of maize. Maize is the model for grasses, for crops, for future applications like biofuels. Now is the time to push maize research to a much higher level.
To accomplish all this, we’ll need to take care of a few things, as the other panel members and members of the community brought up:

• Need to have reciprocal links from genes from MaizeGDB to NCBI Entrez Gene. Currently, about 20,000 NCBI Entrez Genes need links back to MaizeGDB.
• To help with annotation, Lisa Harper, curator of MaizeGDB, will do a movie that shows the common problems of using the databases, including how the genome changes over time as the contigs are reordered, etc. This is needed because people are often working off of older copies of the information for a given gene, as it might not be updated frequently enough.
• There is also a need to integrate microarray data into the databases. Particularly complicated are those microarrays that are specific to a particular tissue and/or developmental stage. Volker says that this problem is common and new technologies with new ways to visualize data are necessary.
• MaizeGDB needs a forum such that people working on the same genes can coordinate their work.
• iPlant is organizing a workshop in St. Louis in June to help coordinate the various genome annotation groups.

• There is a plan to create outreach information that any member of the maize community will be able to download and use to communicate the needs and accomplishments to the public and to government officials.

• how can crop breeders help Asia to feed its people?
• how can we produce energy from crops without worsening the problems of nitrogen runoff?
• how can we maintain and utilize biodiversity?

I read a lot of blogs about food, farming, and environment. Often, the bloggers seem to think that scientists aren’t doing anything about the big problems. Anyone who feels this way should come to one of these meetings and just listen to the participants chat during the “social hour”. You’d be amazed at how the conversation bounces from in depth science to throwing around cool facts (did you know C4 photosynthesis evolved separately 45 times) to deep conversations about how we’re going to feed the world while trying to not mess it up too badly. We’re conscious of the problems of big ag, IP, and the rest. And, we admit that we’re not all that great about communicating our ideas or our work to the public. I hope that’s where Genetic Maize and other science blogs come in.
One last thing before I sign off – To answer the big questions and solve the big problems, we need funding. Peter Peterson, professor emeritus at Iowa State, remarked that he used to have multiple big agency grants all at once, but now researchers must scramble to get one. President Obama’s commitment to science was mentioned a few times in conversation – my general impression is that the researchers are hopeful.
And now I am off to sleep, need to be up bright and early to help register participants in the morning!

Check out the update to this post here.

The talk was videotaped, and the link will likely be posted by the ISU Lectures Program here. I purchased The Doubly Green Revolution, and had it signed! I’m looking forward to reading it and sharing my thoughts. You can read parts of the book on Google Books.

There were so many topics that my notes from the talk don’t flow very well, so please bear with me. My comments are italicized, the rest is approximately what Sir Gordon had to say. I’ve added a few links, if you would like more information.
Speculators triggered the food price crisis but speculators were triggered by 1) Australian droughts, 2) increased 1st generation biofuel production, and 3) increased fertilizer prices that were in turn a result of increased oil prices due to a decline in the dollar. Cost of both of the main ingredients of diammonium phosphate fertilizer has increased. Oil is needed to produce ammonia, and sulfur is in short supply.

Additionally, long term trends were pushing up food prices beneath the spike. The long term increase Is due to increased pressure on the land to produce more animal protein. Demand across the world has increased. China’s demand for pork has particularly skyrocketed.  The world would be better off if we all became vegetarians, but that’s isn’t likely. Those are his words, not mine. I can only say I heartily agree. If everyone chose to eat meat a few times less per week, pressure on land would decrease dramatically, and feeding everyone while preserving the environment would be much easier.

We need to assess why we would grow biofuels. There are many possible goals, and 1^st generation biofuels are not meeting those goals. If we aren’t meeting those goals, we may reconsider whether or not to produce them. Movement to cellulosic ethanol will help, but 4^th generation biofuels will be even better, including biodiesel from algae and bacteria. Fuel from algae can be produced in every little village that currently uses fossil fuels for generators. We will replace petroleum with plants. What a wonderful idea. Every family could have clean fuel to power lights so their children can study.
Yield gain in Africa is stagnant at about 1 bushel per hectare, which is what the British were getting under the Roman Empire.

All of these drivers created about 100 to 150 million more hungry people on top of the starving and malnourished people that already exist. Included among the malnourished are 400 million anemic women of childbearing age who are at increased risk of death, miscarriage, and birth defects. As you may know, anemia is one of my research foci. We need to give children the nutrients they need to develop healthy brains, so they can grow up to help their families and the world.

Some people have asked – if food prices are high, why don’t farmers in developing countries respond by increasing production? There are a number of barriers, not all of which are financial. They require seed, inputs, knowledge through extension, and more in order to respond to the world market. There is no one size fits all solution because all countries are different.

The Green Revolution caused a dramatic decrease in food prices. The oil crisis in the 1970s caused a temporary spike, but it didn’t last very long. The Green Revolution made it possible for India to feed themselves, benefiting the poor and the wealthy.
We can’t simply repeat the Green Revolution due to a few key reasons. High use of pesticides and fertilizers will not work in places that can not access them, and we need to decrease negative impacts of these inputs. Land in places that were not affected by the Green Revolution are highly variable, requiring many farming methods and diverse seed types. This is unlike India where land is relatively uniform. Ten years ago, I argued that we need to repeat the Green revolution but make it environmentally sustainable and equitable.

Sustainability is the intersection of high resilience, stability, productivity, and equity. I’ve been struggling with the definition of sustainability in two of my classes: Debating Science and Sustainable Agriculture Colloquium. This definition is the best I’ve seen, far far better than the sustainability stool of economy, environment, and community. Sustainability is the intersection of the highest levels of each, a system that can meet our needs in a changing world.

To achieve sustainability, we need to use appropriate technology. Traditional technology includes home gardens which have worked very well in some places. Intermediate technology includes modern approaches to traditional methods, such as using Striga to control Desmodium in cornfields.

Conventional technology includes pesticides and fertilizers, tools which may be improved through careful use such as slow release urea briquettes which reduce cost and nitrogen run off. Advanced technology is a diverse category including communication through cell phones, knowledge transfer over the internet, and biotechnology. We need a combination of every technology to get the job done, including new technologies developed to meet challenges of climate change.

Biotechnology is simply a method to tailor desired characteristics in seed or animals. Tissue culture is one example, such as the rice developed by Monty Jones for Africa. Use of genetic engineering is increasing, such as with new labs starting in Africa to improve native crops.

There are problems with GM. We haven’t been able to release GM crops, as with Golden Rice. Bt crops are good, but we need many more types of improvements. For example, cabbage that is resistant to diamondback moth. I wish he had covered the problems that GM has faced with public acceptance.

We need to evaluate GM and all biotech the same way as we must evaluate biofuels. Are they equitable, are they environmentally sustainable…? Also, what is the counterfactual? What will happen if we don’t use this technology? We, as a species, need to start developing crops now to deal with the challenges of the future, or face famine worse than we have ever seen. That’s the counterfactual.

Layering interventions is our best strategy to combat the problems we face. This technique was used successfully in Kenya by the Rockefeller Foundation. Ghana has also used layered interventions, and is the only country to reach their Millennium Development Goal.

These interventions need to include reactions to climate change. The biggest climate change impact will be in agriculture. Some said that there would be an increase in yields due to CO2, but that hasn’t proven true in field trials.  Temperature increase is a problem, but far more important is water. We need to do all we can to combat drought. Irrigation in Africa isn’t likely, so we need to be innovative, developing drought tolerant crops and drought tolerant farming methods.

Climate change will cause a niche shift, meaning that traditional and improved varieties won’t work anymore. Floods and droughts will oscillate in some places, so people will need to diversify their livelihoods. In the West, a family typically means two people with one job each. In the developing world, there are many jobs per family, depending on the season, situation, etc. They must always have something to fall back on. They do whatever they can to educate their children so they can go to the city to earn for their family.

We need to coordinate organizations, form global partnerships to solve global problems with agriculture and food. The partnership of CIMMYT, AATF, the Gates Foundation, and Monsanto to produce roylaty free drought tolerant maize for Africa is one example of what we need.

Thomas Paine said “we have the power to build our world anew”.

Q: Will the EU continue to influence acceptance of GM in Africa?
A: Acceptance will be slowest in Africa, but will speed up as India and China develop new varieties. We need to remember that GM is just one weapon in the armory. Sir Gordon has always been a conscientious advocate of the role GM can serve in sustainable agricultre, even when it has been unpopular. I hope he can help people in England to understand  their role.

Q: What about roads?
A: Connectivity is a major part of the solution. This includes roads and communication, so that farmers can get their goods to market.

Q: I go to a lot of sustainable agriculture seminars and they say things very differently from what you said. What about organic?
A: The key is integration. Organic is very exclusive and doesn’t work everywhere. There will be some pests that require pesticides, some soils that require fertilizer in places where organic fertilizer is not available. Now, we just have to get organic advocates to admit this. Perhaps they should try farming in red clay.

Q: You mentioned extension as one of many solutions. How can we get extension to people who need it most? This was my question, and I was thinking of Jeremy of agro.biodiver.se when I asked it.
A: Africa is a very complicated and diverse place. We really need to train the farmers, so they can be their own extension. We can educate small agrodealers to help solve problems in the field. They can be like pharmacists. Sometimes you don’t need a doctor, you just need to know what OTC remedy will help. Jeremy covered this topic breifly in A puzzle of African farming. If the agrodealers were the extension agents, it could be a way to get solutions to farmers with the knowledge they need to use it. However, there would have to be some safeguards to ensure that the dealers wouldn’t just provide the most expensive remedy!

Sir Gordon Conway, United Kingdom
Chief Scientific Advisor, UK Department for International Development
President (ret.), Rockefeller Foundation

Sir Gordon Conway, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of England in 2005, is a world renowned agricultural ecologist.  He pioneered integrated pest management in Borneo (Malaysia) in the 1960s, and developed agroecosystems analysis in Thailand.  He was one of the first to define the concept of sustainable agriculture.   From 1970 to 1986 he was Professor of Environmental Technology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London.  He also directed the sustainable agriculture program of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London before becoming a representative of the Ford Foundation in New Delhi from 1988 to 1992. 

Sir Gordon was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and Chair of the Institute for Developmental Studies.  Among his publications are: Unwelcome Harvest: Agriculture and Pollution, The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for all in the 21st century and Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All.  He was educated at the Universities of Wales (Bangor), Cambridge, Trinidad and California (Davis). 

If only I had I had the opportunity to spend some time with him. Integrated pest management has been an interest of mine since my first days as a Preventive Medicine Specialist in the Army (I love learning how IPM applies to agriculture). I’d love hearing what it was like to work for these important non-profits doing so much good in the world. I’d especially love to talk with him about how all of us can work to make the world a better place. 
I’m most looking forward to attending his talk because he is an optomist. To have seen all that he has seen yet retain hope and faith in the human ability to overcome obstacles… it’s definately something to aspire to. I found a great example of his optomism and intelligence at Gaia Discovery in the article Sir Gordon Conway on Feeding the World. Sir Gordon says we need to concentrate on “enabling people everywhere to use whatever technology they can use and infrastructure such as input and output markets, to grow more.”

“It’s not just a case of using more fertilizer or the latest hybrid genetically-modified (GM) crops. It’s about giving farmers the best solution to their problems, whether that is pest control, improving water supply or better access to markets. If we can do all these, then people have the option to try other things, like those carnations and walnuts [refering to cash crops], which take them away from subsistence. That’s what we really need if we are to feed the world,” he adds.

I don’t know anyone who thinks GM will solve every problem, but it needs to be an option for farmers, for people who need to grow food to live. While president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Sir Conway challenged anti GM sentiment and blamed the board of Monsanto for the controversey over GM because of their failure to address legitamate concerns about their products, according to the Guardian and Fortune (the articles are old so the science they mention is outdated). 
Such pragmatism is exactly what we need in a world of hype and misinformation!
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Also upcoming will be an interview with a friend and fellow graduate student in Iowa State’s Interdepartmental Genetics program. His summer was spent making late blight resistant potatoes, destined for Africa, only to be told that his project was illegal due to IP issues. We only have to find the time to talk!

There hasn’t ben much talk of genetic engineering (these are plant breeders after all) but the insights into lignocellulosic biofuels were astounding. As I’ve said before, grain ethanol is the 1st generation of biofuel technology. Expected to be imperfect, it has paved the way for more efficient and more sustainable biofuels. 

The abstracts for each speaker at the conference are posted here. Feel free to take a look and let me know if you’d like me to focus on any particular one. Strangely, my overall favorite so far was the economist! On a related side note, I found an interview of Joe Fargione of the Nature Conservancy. His numbers differ a bit from the ones reported at the conference, but what I’m particularly interested in are his closing comments:

Nature.org: So is there any place for biofuels in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing climate change?

Joe Fargione: There is a role for biofuels. Although there is no silver bullet to solve climate change, there are many silver BBs.

Biofuels can be a silver BB if produced without requiring additional land to be converted from native habitats to agriculture. For example, biofuels can be made from waste from agriculture and forests, and from native grasses and woody biomass grown on marginal lands unsuitable for crop production.

We not only have to consider how we produce biomass, but how we convert it to energy. Producing liquid transportation fuels may not be the most efficient way to use the energy contained in biomass.

Multiple technologies currently exist that can economically convert biomass for heat, cooling and electricity. To make the best use of biomass from a climate change standpoint, we should consider these uses, not just producing liquid transportation fuel.

This is precisely what the scientists here at the Plant Breeding Lecture Series are talking about. Details to follow.