WOODLAND, Calif. - Alan Krivanek, a tomato breeder for Monsanto, dons a white protective suit, wipes his feet on a mat of disinfectant and enters a greenhouse to survey 80,000 seedlings.
Krivanek is armed with a spreadsheet that will tell him which ones are likely to resist a slew of diseases. The rest he will discard.
Krivanek, 42, is part of a new generation of plant breeders who are transforming the 10,000-year history of plant selection. And their work has quietly become the cutting-edge technology among today’s major plant biotech companies. Instead of spending decades physically identifying plants that will bear fruits of the desired color and firmness, stand up to drought and more, breeders are able to speed the process through DNA screening.
When his tomato plants were just a week old, technicians manually punched a hole in each seedling to get leaf tissue that was taken to a nearby lab, converted into a chemical soup and then scanned for genetic markers linked to desired traits.
Krivanek uses the information to keep just 3 percent of the seedlings to grow until they fruit this spring, when he can evaluate fully grown plants, keep a few hundred, sow their seeds and then screen those plants.
“I’m improving my odds. Maybe I can introduce to market a real super-hybrid in five years,” Krivanek said. “A predecessor might take a whole career.”
The technology - called marker-assisted or molecular breeding - is far removed from the better-known and more controversial field of genetic engineering, in which a plant or animal can receive genes from a different organism.
Marker-assisted breeding, by contrast, lays bare the inherent genetic potential of an individual plant to allow breeders to find the most promising seedling among thousands for further breeding. Because the plant’s natural genetic boundaries are not crossed, the resulting commercial hybrid is spared the regulatory gantlet and public opposition focused on such plants as genetically modified Roundup Ready corn or soybeans, which are engineered to withstand herbicide sprays.
Marker-assisted breeding has been embraced not only by the multinational biotech companies in California’s Central Valley but also by plant scientists in government, research universities and in nongovernmental organizations fervently seeking new, overachieving crops. The goal is to sustainably feed an expanding global pop new applied science, said John Navazio, a senior scientist with the Organic Seed Alliance.
“There used to be a significant winter spinach production area in southern Virginia and Delmarva, and that’s completely gone,” he said. The spinach-growing industry has moved to megagrowers in California and Arizona.
Few observers, though, expect plant scientists to abandon a technology that already has yielded significant results. One of the earliest validations of marker-assisted breeding came in 2009 with the introduction of a rice variety in India that could survive complete submersion after monsoons, which earned it the nickname “scuba rice.” Once theulation while dealing with the extremes of climate change.
But critics of Big Agriculture worry about the needs of small-scale farmers and breeders. Low-tech, conventional breeding - judging plants by how they look and perform, not by their DNA - has been the lifeblood of small seed companies and local growers, often in conjunction with breeding programs at land-grant universities. But those programs have shrunk by a third in recent years, and the remaining ones are increasingly gravitating to the trendy sphere of molecular breeding.
Organic farmers, who need crop varieties designed for specific regions and less intensive growing methods, are not being served by the genetic marker was identified, the variety was developed in just three years by scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, the Philippines.
The key was to create rice that looked and performed like the existing one favored by Indian farmers - so that it would be accepted - but with the flood-tolerant gene, said Glenn Gregorio, a senior rice breeder with the institute. The organization has since released more than 10 additional monsoon-resistant varieties to flood-prone areas of India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The varieties would have been extremely difficult to create with conventional breeding, he said, and taken decades to achieve.
The big multinational companies, including Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont Pioneer, Bayer CropScience and Dow AgroSciences, have invested heavily in the new plant-breeding programs, which will increasingly require colossal data-processing abilities.
“In many ways, the company has gone beyond” genetic engineering, said Robert Fraley, Monsanto’s chief scientist. “The breeding technology has changed dramatically in the last few years.”
Marker-assisted breeding won’t bring an end to genetically modified organisms, scientists say, because genetically engineered crops can achieve highly specific tasks now unobtainable through even marker-assisted breeding. But given the obstacles to GMO development - $100 million to create one variety, at least 10 years for regulatory approval and widespread public opposition - marker-assisted breeding has become alluring to such companies as Monsanto.
It is attractive because it is a powerful tool to assemble an array of desirable traits in a plant. A GMO plant, by contrast, has been engineered for a specific task - such as containing a bacterium that would kill a certain pest.
“GMO really hasn’t delivered on its promises,” said Janet Cotter, a scientist with Greenpeace’s international science unit in Exeter, England. “For more-complex traits, I think people are seeing marker-assisted selection as a lot more valuable.”
The rice institute’s Gregorio said that about 5 percent of its breeding programs involve genetically engineered varieties, while marker-assisted varieties account for as much as 15 percent.
In a decade, probably two-thirds of its introductions will be developed through next generation advanced molecular breeding, he said.
The technology has been around for about 20 years but has become much easier and less expensive to use in the past few years, and consumers are only now seeing the results. Precision-bred cucumbers, peppers and other vegetables are showing up in supermarkets, but the unlabeled and brandless nature of loose produce makes it difficult to distinguish them, said Carly Scaduto, a spokesman for Monsanto.
Some varieties of Monsanto’s improved-nutrition broccoli - branded as Beneforté - became widely available in 2012. Last year, the company introduced Debut, an advanced hybrid tomato for growers and home gardeners. Blight-resistant peppers are in the final stage of testing before their commercial introduction, she said.
For developing nations, the technology promises to avert certain crop disasters; for the supermarket shopper in the West, it might bring a whole new experience: flavor.
Seed companies acknowledge that in their quest to improve yield and shelf life, the taste has suffered, but they say that advanced breeding is bringing heirloom flavors back to industrialized varieties.
“This is one area where [marker-assisted] breeding begins to make an impact,” said Alexander Tokarz, head of vegetables for Syngenta, the Swiss biotech giant. “Early on, we brought shelf life into tomatoes and lost the flavor.”
Business, Pages 19 on 04/21/2014