Periodic Reporting for period 1 - 3P-Tec (3P-Tec - Three-parent breeding technology for plants of the future)
Período documentado: 2022-07-01 hasta 2023-06-30
Combinations of different beneficial cultivars (hybridisations) have been a powerful genetic source for new and locally adapted cultivars; However, this approach has severe limitations: The generation of hybrids is time consuming and the inheritance of foreign or additional DNA frequently induces an incompatibility response (hybridization barrier) resulting in seed abortion.
Three parent plants - a breakthrough in plant breeding | At the University of Bremen, we discovered that plant egg cells can fuse with two sperm producing offspring with three parents instead of two - one mother and two fathers. Such three parent crosses are a game changer for current agricultural challenges: First, they can speed up breeding processes by instantly combining beneficial traits of three parents. Second, three parent crosses can bypass a hybridization barrier of the seed. This opens the door for the combination of plants that could previously not be combined, and the introgression of traits conferring enhanced climate robustness or pest resistance from wild adapted crop relatives.
Objectives | The development of the 3PaTec technology for further crop plants, the establishment of technologies that enhance the efficiency of obtaining three parent plants, and the commercial exploitation of 3P-Tec are aims of this project.
Impact | 3PaTec will revolutionize the ability of breeders to develop improved crops in providing a tool to mine beneficial gene variants of currently incompatible species and to substantially shorten time to market of climate-adapted seed varieties. It provides a novel breeding strategy with economic benefits expected to positively affect the social welfare of farmers as well as upstream and downstream industries related to the agricultural value chain.
References | 1. L. T. Hickey et al., Breeding crops to feed 10 billion. Nat Biotechnol 37, 744-754 (2019). 2. IPCC, in Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems J. S. P.R. Shukla, E. Calvo Buendia, V. Masson-Delmotte, H.- O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, P. Zhai, R. Slade, S. Connors, R. van Diemen, M. Ferrat, E. Haughey, S. Luz, S. Neogi, M. Pathak, J. Petzold, J. Portugal Pereira, P. Vyas, E. Huntley, K. Kissick, M. Belkacemi, J. Malley, , Ed. (IPCC, https://www.ipcc.ch/ 2019). 3. S. Diaz et al., Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change. Science 366, (2019). 4. B. A. Toreti A., Perez-Dominguez I., Naumann G., Luterbacher J., Cronie O., Seguini L., Manfron G., Lopez- Lozano R., Baruth B., van den Berg M., Dentener F., Ceglar A., Chatzopoulos T., Zampieri M., The Exceptional 2018 European Water Seesaw Calls for Action on Adaptation. Advancing Earth and Space Science 7, 652-663 (2019). 5. F. Monteiro et al., Genetic and Genomic Tools to Asssist Sugar Beet Improvement: The Value of the Crop Wild Relatives. Front Plant Sci 9, 74 (2018). 6. FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Climate change and food security: risks and
responses. (2016).
We have shown that the endopeptidases ECS1 and ECS2 trigger the induction of maternal haploids. Capitalizing on a high-throughput polyspermy assay, we in addition found that plants defective for both genes exhibits a three-fold increase in polyspermy frequencies enhancing the generation of triparental plants. As both haploid induction and polyspermy-induced triparentage are valuable breeding aims, our results open new avenues for accelerated production of climate adapted cultivars.
Yanbo Mao, Thomas Nakel, Isil Erbasol Serbes, Saurabh Joshi, Dawit G Tekleyohans, Thomas Baum, Rita Groß-Hardt (2023) ECS1 and ECS2 suppress polyspermy and the formation of haploid plants by promoting double fertilization eLife 12:e85832 https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85832
A preprint was published in January 2022: Yanbo Mao, Thomas Nakel, Isil Erbasol Serbes, Dawit G Tekleyohans, Saurabh Joshi, Dawit G Tekleyohans, Thomas Baum, Rita Groß-Hardt: ECS1 and ECS2 regulate polyspermy and suppress the formation of haploid plants by promoting double fertilization.
BioRxiv doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.20.476184