47 Genomic selection and gene editing in plant breeding – an industry perspective

Abstract

Abstract The world population is on an inevitable growth trajectory presenting the challenge of feeding nearly 9 billion people within the next couple of decades. This anticipated population surge is projected to require a 50% increase in agricultural output by 2050 in comparison to the current decade’s output levels (FAO, 2017). This increase in output needs to occur in an environment that is witnessing foreseeable declines in farming operations and availability of agricultural land in addition to an increase in consumer’s demand for high quality sustainable food products. At Corteva Agriscience, we build upon our strong pillars of seeds and traits platform, crop protection and seed treatment solutions as well as advanced digital technologies to continuously provide innovative and sustainable solutions to our customers, helping farmers maximize the value of their investment by providing them with high-performing genetics and effective science-based solutions that optimize yield and crop quality. We capitalize on the use of state of the art technologies and applications in the fields of genomics, phenomics, chemistry, and the like, to drive our industry leading product pipelines. Following the conceptual introduction of genomic selection (Meuwissen et al., 2001) and the increased affordability of genotyping, incorporation of genomic information, via genomic selection, whole genome prediction or more recently gene editing into our breeding pipeline has helped us improve the efficiency and output of our breeding systems and present our customers with innovative and sustainable seed product solutions. This presentation will focus first on introducing some common plant breeding industry practices related to population and product development before providing an overview of genomic selection and its applications in an industrial plant breeding context and finally discuss how new seed product development tools like CRISPR-Cas gene editing could be used to further improve breeding and selection.