''Challenges and Opportunities of Breeding by Design''

Fred Van Ex

Vice President R&D

Managing Director Inari Agriculture

BELGIUM

Thursday, June 16, 2022
11:00

Global demand for food and feed is increasing at a rapid pace as a consequence of a growing global population and challenging environmental conditions. Conventional and modern breeding approaches, developed during the Green Revolution, have had a major contribution to the consistent yield increases observed during the past decades but are leveling off and are no longer keeping pace with the growing demands. Reducing genetic diversity and lengthy breeding timelines will further limit what can be achieved through regular breeding. Rapid climate change is putting an additional challenge to what can be achieved in the timelines needed for breeding to obtain high yielding varieties adapted to new environmental conditions and concerns over environmental sustainability will reduce yield gains caused by use of agronomical inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides. Consequently, rapid and significant improvement of varieties need to be achieved through a combination of breeding, improved agronomical practices and new breeding techniques such as gene editing.

In this seminar, an overview will be provided of the Inari Agriculture toolbox which is being developed. This toolbox is enabling us to develop improved crop varieties that deliver superior yields with reduced needs of inputs such as water and fertilizer in order to meet the global demands of food security and environmental sustainability. Our toolbox will enable the rapid development of novel allele variation by generating high order multiplex edited populations. Phenotypic selection of plants from this population enables the identification of novel, high order, allele combinations. In addition, the efficient generation of multitype edited plants leads to the generation of novel alleles. This approach already resulted in the identification of interesting genes and alleles linked with improved water and nitrogen use efficiency.

Jozef Schell seminar room
Technologiepark 71 - 9052 

Genome editing, cutting-edge technology for a sustainable agriculture