The University of Queensland breeding program that co-bred the Trifecta and Sequel lucerne varieties specifically for northern Australia has two more on the way, with even better adaptability for Queensland and northern New South Wales.

The first of two, new disease resistant varieties bred by the CRC for Tropical Plant Protection at the University of Queensland should reach commercial release by Pacific Seeds within three years and the second 12 months later.

Licensed to Pacific Seeds as PAC 701 and PAC 901, the two new lines were bred by the CRC's Professor John Irwin, co-breeder of the Sequel and Trifecta lucernes which were released in the 1980s and remain successful varieties today.

Like Sequel and Trifecta, PAC 701 and PAC 901 were bred specifically to suit the climatic and disease conditions of northern Australia, although with much better resistance to the major diseases Phytophthora root rot and Colletotrichum crown rot (anthracnose).

They're also the result of wide ranging CRC for Tropical Plant Protection research under the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) supported project “Pathology support for lucerne improvement, including germplasm enhancement”.

The five year project requires Professor Irwin’s research team to:

• regularly survey lucerne crops across the northern grains region to identify diseases and pests that are production constraints,

• provide on-going breeding programs with virulent pathogen isolates,

• develop appropriate screening assays for diseases causing productivity decreases, and

• generate a linkage map with markers linked to various resistance genes and which will assist in the identification of multiple disease and pest resistant germplasm for use in the breeding programs.

Professor Irwin says the same Phytophthora that attacks chickpeas is a particular problem in lucerne crops on the heavy soils that are common across the northern grains region.

“The crown rot/anthracnose that attacks lucerne can be devastating on winter active lucernes, which are the ones that should be grown in the north,” Professor Irwin said.

“Three crown rot/anthracnose races have been isolated in Australian lucerne stands, including one new to this country and another which is the first reported anywhere in the world.

“Currently only three of the 22 Australian cultivars we tested have resistance to all three races.

“The line PAC 701, with Trifecta to Aurora type dormancy has extremely high resistance to Phytophthora and all the anthracnose races, as well as good aphid resistance.

“PAC 901 has the same disease and pest-resistance profile as 701 but is more winter active, and yield data from trials at Gatton, shows it out-yields every other ommercially available variety.”

Stefan Kempff, production research coordinator for Pacific Seeds in Toowoomba,  said PAC 701 would move into company trials as soon as possible, with commercial quantities of seed possible within three years as long as the variety continued to perform well in the trials.

PAC901 would pass through the same system, but currently was 12 months behind PAC701.