The challenge | Current time-consuming breeding strategies do not meet the demand of a rapidly changing world. Within the next decades, the world population is expected to grow by 25% to reach 10 billion people in 2050 (1). In addition, an increase in global temperature relative to pre-industrial levels now already adversely effects crop yield and food supply (2) and the impacts are set to accelerate (3). The European Joint Research Center warns that the extreme drought affecting central and northern Europe in 2018 could become the norm within 25 years (4). Within this time span, drought is expected to cause salinization of 50% of all arable lands, while ecological niches of plant pathogens are expected to shift (5). Ensuring food security is hence among the most daunting challenges facing humankind (6).
Combinations of different beneficial cultivars (hybridisations) have been a powerful genetic source for new and locally adapted cultivars; However, this approach has severe limitations: The generation of hybrids is time consuming and the inheritance of foreign or additional DNA frequently induces an incompatibility response (hybridization barrier) resulting in seed abortion.
Three parent plants - a breakthrough in plant breeding | At the University of Bremen, we discovered that plant egg cells can fuse with two sperm producing offspring with three parents instead of two - one mother and two fathers. Such three parent crosses are a game changer for current agricultural challenges: First, they can speed up breeding processes by instantly combining beneficial traits of three parents. Second, three parent crosses can bypass a hybridization barrier of the seed. This opens the door for the combination of plants that could previously not be combined, and the introgression of traits conferring enhanced climate robustness or pest resistance from wild adapted crop relatives.
Objectives | The development of the 3PaTec technology for further crop plants, the establishment of technologies that enhance the efficiency of obtaining three parent plants, and the commercial exploitation of 3P-Tec are aims of this project.
Impact | 3PaTec will revolutionize the ability of breeders to develop improved crops in providing a tool to mine beneficial gene variants of currently incompatible species and to substantially shorten time to market of climate-adapted seed varieties. It provides a novel breeding strategy with economic benefits expected to positively affect the social welfare of farmers as well as upstream and downstream industries related to the agricultural value chain.
References | 1. L. T. Hickey et al., Breeding crops to feed 10 billion. Nat Biotechnol 37, 744-754 (2019). 2. IPCC, in Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems J. S. P.R. Shukla, E. Calvo Buendia, V. Masson-Delmotte, H.- O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, P. Zhai, R. Slade, S. Connors, R. van Diemen, M. Ferrat, E. Haughey, S. Luz, S. Neogi, M. Pathak, J. Petzold, J. Portugal Pereira, P. Vyas, E. Huntley, K. Kissick, M. Belkacemi, J. Malley, , Ed. (IPCC, https://www.ipcc.ch/ 2019). 3. S. Diaz et al., Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change. Science 366, (2019). 4. B. A. Toreti A., Perez-Dominguez I., Naumann G., Luterbacher J., Cronie O., Seguini L., Manfron G., Lopez- Lozano R., Baruth B., van den Berg M., Dentener F., Ceglar A., Chatzopoulos T., Zampieri M., The Exceptional 2018 European Water Seesaw Calls for Action on Adaptation. Advancing Earth and Space Science 7, 652-663 (2019). 5. F. Monteiro et al., Genetic and Genomic Tools to Asssist Sugar Beet Improvement: The Value of the Crop Wild Relatives. Front Plant Sci 9, 74 (2018). 6. FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Climate change and food security: risks and
responses. (2016).
