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Tuesday, 22-May-2012 10:28:39 BST
IGER research to meet the challenge of climate change
A £1million plus grant awarded to the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER), at Aberystwyth will allow scientists to develop superior plant varieties that are able to adapt to the challenge of climate change.
The work being funded by the grant will facilitate the identification of genes that control target traits, i.e. characters that are important for developing new plant varieties that are able to meet the demands of sustainable agriculture, climate change and biorenewables.
This information can then be used in conventional breeding programmes to breed new superior plant varieties. For instance, this strategy has been successfully undertaken for a "staygreen" gene that prevents grass from turning yellow.
Professor Ian King who heads the research team at the Aberystwyth based station says that "a key driver of IGER's research will be the development of plant varieties that are able to meet the demand for increased output coupled with the need to adapt to global warming and sustainable farm practices.
"This award (1) will allow us to undertake research that will enable the transfer of information on the genetic control of traits across the monocot species, such as wheat, barley, grass and the sequenced rice genome. In layman's terms this allows the species to "talk" to one another.
"A target trait for sustainable agriculture is increased nitrogen uptake where you can put less fertiliser on the crop thereby reducing pollution. Examples of climate change traits are drought tolerance or changing the flowering time of plant so that flowering occurs in cooler periods.
"It is extremely important that we develop new species of plants that are able to withstand stress such as drought brought about by environmental change, and which require lower fertiliser inputs thus lowering pollution and carbon outputs.
"In addition to conventional agricultural use grass also has the potential to be exploited for the development of environmentally friendly biofuels and platform chemicals. Biorenewable traits would include fermentability to increase the amout of ethanol you can extract from grass."
IGER since the days of the old Welsh Plant Breeding Station has pioneered new strains of grasses which have benefited grassland management worldwide, and are world leaders in grassland related research such as breeding and genomics. While grassland is the predominant crop in Wales, it also accounts for more than 50% of the land area and 70% of all agricultural use in the UK. (2)
Prof. Mervyn Humphreys, Director of IGER said, "These are exciting times for scientists at IGER. While the centres of excellence in research and breeding in the UK for barley and wheat are located in Scotland and England respectively, the centre of excellence for grassland research is located at IGER Aberystwyth.
"There are four major grassland bioscience research programmes currently undertaken by IGER Aberystwyth and this substantial award made by the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council again recognises the expertise of the Ceredigion based scientists in grassland research and reaffirms the Institute’s importance as a centre for excellence."
NOTES TO EDITORS:
(1) The research will be undertaken in collaboration with scientists at the John Innes Institute, Norwich, and the Scottish Crop Research Institute at Dundee belonging to a research consortium called “Monogram. The research will also involve collaboration throughout Europe (E.g. Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, the Czech Republic), the US (Missouri, USDA, Cornell University) and New Zealand via an Auckland based company "Vialactia".
(2) The agricultural economic value of grassland compares well with other monocot crops within the UK e.g the farm gate value of grassland measured by its end products, meat and milk, is valued at £6billion per annum, while the farm gate value of all cereals (wheat, barley and oats) is £2.36billion per annum ["Agriculture in the UK" – DEFRA]. Furthermore, meat consumption has been predicted to increase annually by 7% over the next decade.
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