Western Australia
December 15, 2006
Growers will enjoy quicker access
to new, more productive pasture legumes, following
rationalisation of one of Western Australia’s important seedbank
collections by the Centre
for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture (CLIMA) and the
Department of Agriculture
and Food, Western Australia (DAFWA).
Western Australia has a world class collection of bladder
clovers (Trifolium spumosum L.), which exhibit good
yields, easy harvesting, hard-seededness and suit the
wheatbelt’s fine textured soils and environments where
subclovers and medics once grew well.
Seed has been accumulated from ancient Middle Eastern ruins,
southern Italian vineyards, or towns nestled on the Adriatic
coastline, all regions with Western Australia-like Mediterranean
climates and environments.
Australian Trifolium Genetic Resource Centre (ATGRC) curator,
Richard Snowball of DAFWA, who developed and supervised the
GRDC-funded project, said
the collection was now so large and diverse that selecting
promising wild accessions and genotypes was too time-consuming.
But all that is changing, due to rationalising the seedbank from
390 accessions to 32.
CLIMA researcher and project leader based at the
University of Western Australia
(UWA), Dr Kioumars Ghamkhar said growers would benefit from the
smaller subset.
“Despite reducing the seedbank by 90 per cent, biodiversity
across this core collection has only reduced by about 15 per
cent, thanks to exploiting accurate molecular and
eco-geographical techniques when making the selections,” he
said.
“This means the 32 core accessions strongly represent all
available beneficial traits across the complete collection,
while the time breeders need to search for specific traits to
meet grower needs will substantially reduce.
“Once a core accession of interest is identified, our data can
help them go back to the main collection and quickly and
accurately select relatives of those accessions with similar
traits,” Dr Ghamkar said.
Pasture consultant and Tincurrin grower, Neil Ballard, welcomed
rationalising and speeding up the variety breeding process.
“Bladder clover has huge potential for southern Australia and is
one of the species included in the National Annual Pasture
Legume Improvement Program,” he said.
“It’s great growers will soon benefit from an excellent pasture
species, through the anticipated release of a first variety from
DAFWA’s conventional bladder clover breeding program in 2007.
“And thanks to the rationalised program and core collection
project, they won’t have to wait long for further varieties bred
for specific traits,” Mr Ballard added.
This project’s proven and efficient techniques will be adapted
to develop a sub-terranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum
L.) core collection from the 8000 or so accessions and genotypes
at the ATGRC, with funding from the Australian Research Council,
DAFWA and UWA. |