Why is plant biotechnology such an important matter for Bayer CropScience?
The plants of the future will better fit into environmentally-compatible and climate-adapted farming approaches – because they’ll use less water and yet produce more yield. We also want to help to provide the growing world population with sufficient quantities of high-quality food – at affordable prices.
And how can the new breeding techniques help?
The various techniques used by biochemists and gene experts, are already complementing the work of our breeders in a crucial way: they make it possible to look deep inside the plant – through the leaves, stems and roots, and into the core of every cell – the genome in the cell nucleus. In this way, we can tell as early as the seedling stage whether or not a plant will express a particular feature. This saves time and money: if the development of a variety using conventional breeding methods took around ten years, biotechnological methods can now significantly reduce the time needed to complete the selection process.
What is new about the plant biotechnological methods?
Thanks to advances in molecular biology, it is now possible to characterize the properties of plants on the basis of the genes they carry. And the more we learn about crops through the use of biotechnology, the better we can identify the mechanisms and genetic networks that underlie certain characteristics. We can then target and change these networks.
Which particular characteristics do the researchers at BioScience concentrate on?
Our teams in Ghent (Belgium), Morrisville (US) and the colleagues from Nunhems (Netherlands) pull rice, cotton, canola, wheat, soybean and vegetable species through a real fitness program: they improve the taste, shelf life and the processing capabilities of e.g. tomatoes, and make crop plants more tolerant to stresses such as drought and nutrient deficiency. These characteristics are much more complicated than those that were targeted during the early days of plant biotechnology, i.e. by plant genetic engineering.
How do the new methods differ from the classical plant genetic engineering approaches?
Plant genetic engineering was basically limited to properties such as insect resistance and herbicide tolerance for pest and weed control. This early plant biotechnology work mostly involved the introduction of single genes – mostly bacterial in origin – into the gene pools of crops, and varieties of different crops with these traits are currently on the market. Advances in genome sequencing and biotechnology now offer us new selection techniques that can equip plants with improved characteristics such as tolerance to drought and nutrient and light deprivation, or can increase their yield potential. Because of the complexity of these properties, it is no longer sufficient simply to introduce a single gene into a plant.
Your work involves dealing with large data sets. How do you manage to keep an overview?
Of course, wherever large amounts of data are collected, the support of bioinformaticians and statisticians and their tools is essential. Here in Ghent for example, the number of bioinformaticians among the 300 staff has risen within a few years from five to more than 30. And international cooperation is becoming increasingly important to achieve success with our research targets: we are already cooperating with numerous companies, universities and other research institutions around the world. And we want to integrate new technologies into our portfolio even more intensively in the future.
So the BioScience unit will become even more important in the future?
Yes, Bayer CropScience has recognized the seeds and traits business as an attractive growth opportunity for further investment and is willing to commit financial resources to expand our research activities as well. A recent example is the new greenhouse complex at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the site of our U.S. Headquarters. Bayer CropScience is investing around 20 million U.S. dollars into this new facility. The greenhouses are designed for research into both genetically-modified and conventional plants. The greenhouse complex – being part of the new Innovation Centre at Morrisville – will quickly develop into an important research center for Bayer CropScience. In addition, we also would like to make better use of the growing innovative strength in Asia; countries like China have defined agriculture as a strategic area of their economy and are committed to fund innovation in this sector in order to match the needs of their growing population.
What excites you most about plant biotechnology?
Mendel‘s rules, chromosomes and epigenetics: these are all important basics for modern genetics and cell biology, and they were all discovered through work on the plant genome. Only later were the findings applied to humans and further explored for medical purposes. Research into plant molecular biology is more diversified than the study of human cell biology. Because each plant species brings its own challenges: rice is built differently from rape, for example. And whereas one rice variety can be resistant to flooding, another can immediately find itself under stress.
