From: AgBiotech Bulletin - Volume 10, Issue 4

When canola blooms, farmers get nervous. Too little moisture and too much heat, and the blossoms drop off before setting seed. Within a week, the die is cast: yields will be down, maybe by as much as 50 per cent.

Dr. David Dennis explains that the plants are simply looking out for their best interests. Under harsh conditions, plants strive for quality, not quantity: a few viable seeds rather than many seeds that aren’t capable of producing the next generation.

"Over 125 million years, plants have evolved for their own good, not our good," he says. "Things that may be better for plants in the wild may not be best for us for commercial purposes."

Dennis is President of Performance Plants, Inc., which has developed a genetic modification to help plants guard against drought loss. Essentially, it improves the molecular "switch" that opens and closes plant stomata in response to drought stress. These tiny openings pass both gases and moisture.

"What we’ve done to the plant is make it more sensitive to the signal," Dennis says. "The transgenic plants close them sooner and better."

As with many discoveries, Yield Protection Technology, as it is now called, was borne of serendipity. Dennis explains that a grad student forgot to water the plants in a project that a colleague was working on in the early 1990s. After the weekend, all were dead, except a few specimens with an extreme drought tolerance mutation. This mutation became the foundation of the new technology.

Results have been impressive. Tests show yields are up to 80 per cent higher than controls under drought conditions, and 10 per cent higher when conditions are optimal. Under drought conditions, control plants produced only 10 per cent of optimum yield.

Dr. Kevin Gellatly is Director of Strategic Alliances for the company at its Saskatoon research centre. He says drought tolerance is one of several projects aimed at protecting and increasing yield, using resources within the plant’s own genome.

"What we do is understand how the plant works, how it responds to environmental stress, how it grows, what makes it grow better," Gellatly says. "We actually modify the plant’s own system."

Traits for basic metabolic functions like photosynthesis are highly conserved. Once found in one plant, the analog in other crop species can also be developed. Yield Protection Technology, for example, is currently being tested in elite lines of corn and soybean, with the Saskatoon facility working toward the same goal in canola. Experimental and field trial results are to be available in spring and fall of 2002, respectively.

With the technology, Performance Plants has nearly filled the pipeline from discovery research to market. At its head office in Kingston, Ontario, work continues to "prime the pump" by finding genes of interest for traits like tolerance to cold, salinity and disease, or efficient use of soil nutrients.

Discovery of new genes is also driven through an Industrial Research Chair in Plant Genetics at the University of Toronto, supported jointly by the company, NSERC, and the university. The chair is currently held by plant hormone specialist Dr. Peter McCourt. Performance Plants gets first access to discoveries from this program.

Development of the discoveries is carried out at the company’s facilities at the Biosciences Complex on the campus of Queen’s University in Kingston. Dennis worked as a researcher and professor at the university for 30 years before helping launch the company in 1995.

Initially, Dennis and his colleagues spent a lot of time talking to farm groups and biotech companies. Saskatoon, with its strong biotech base, was a natural lure.

Dennis credits Dr. Pete Desai, currently Ag-West Biotech’s chair, for giving the company direction in its formative stages. He explained that nascent biotech companies, particularly those headed by university professors, tend to think of funding in terms of grants you ask for, rather than markets you can serve.

"Pete Desai told me, ‘instead of asking people for money, ask people what their problems are,’" Dennis says. "This was probably the best piece of advice the company ever got. Right from the start, we began thinking of products, how we could make it useful."

Dennis says if the corn field trials planned for this summer pan out, the next step will be to go to South America for more trials. This north-south rotation is often used by companies to squeeze as many growing seasons as possible into a given time frame to speed development. The first commercial varieties using Performance Plants technology should arrive in North American fields by 2006.

The AgBiotech Bulletin is produced by Ag-West Biotech Inc.
Editor: Judy Hume, Manager of Communications, Ag-West Biotech Inc.
Ag-West Biotech Inc.
101-111 Research Dr.
Saskatoon, SK S7N 3R2
Canada
Phone: 306-975-1939
Fax: 306-975-1966
Web site: http://www.agwest.sk.ca