It wasn’t exactly looking for a needle in a haystack, but the process leading to the pending release of two new varieties of mungbeans did involve a lot of hard work and selection.

The work began when the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries (QDPI&F) took over the Grains Research and Development Corporation’s (GRDC’s) national mungbean breeding program from the CSIRO three years ago.

CSIRO passed Hermitage Research Station plant breeder Merrill Ryan (then Merrill Fordyce) 160 elite mungbean lines its breeding team had produced during their closing stages of the program.

As well as the CSIRO lines, QDPI&F accessed 1000 more  from the mungbean genebank  in the Tropical Forage Crops Germplasm Collection Centre in Biloela, in Central Queensland.

So, in the 2003-2004 summer cropping season, Dr Ryan accepted the challenge of evaluating “every mungbean ever brought into this country” – more than 1000 of them – for yield potential, seed quality, disease resistance and agronomic traits.

Lines were culled for poor performance on shattering, susceptibility to the major diseases tan spot and powdery mildew, seed quality, lodging and yield.

That cut the field a lot. Dr Ryan selected the best 40 of the CSIRO lines – all with the large seed accepted by the market – and the top 100 of the lines from Biloela – 40 large seeded and 60 small seeded – for further testing.

That work identified the line 45/52-21 as the best candidate for release from the CSIRO material.

Dr Ryan says that, while 45/52-21 has the commercial varieties White Gold and Emerald in its pedigree, it has outyielded Emerald by up to 15 per cent and White Gold by two per cent over 23 trial sites.

It compares with those two parents on quality and harvestability, does not shatter and has better tan spot and powdery mildew resistance than all current commercial lines of mungbean.

The other potential release, VC3890A, came directly from the Biloela collection and will be a replacement for Satin.

It has reduced lodging, 14 per cent higher yield than Satin and phenomenal quality. It is more uniform than Satin in colour, while its height and plant maturity is equal to that variety.