Canada - Seed World

At UC Davis, Reagan Reed is testing how genes work together to influence germination and seed quality. Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause. “I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says. What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range o

With public agricultural research under pressure, emerging scientist Ben Erickson explains what Canada must do to keep young plant breeders—and their expertise—at home. As Canada scales back public agricultural research, young scientists are facing questions that extend beyond their next job. Is there still a place for them to build a career here—or will they have to look elsewhere? In a new episode of the Seed World podcast, Ben Erickson reflects on that uncertainty and what it could mean for

Corn breeder Zachary Jones explains why communication, confidence and a commitment to rural communities still matter in the age of AI. Artificial intelligence dominated the official agenda when plant breeders gathered at Texas A&M University in June for the annual meeting of the National Association for Plant Breeding. But beneath the conversations about genomics, phenomics and machine learning was a more human question: What kind of people will be needed to turn those technologies into better

Technology lets breeders evaluate tens of thousands of candidates, but Brian Rossnagel says efficiency cannot replace scientific talent and competing ways of thinking. Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it. The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become vi

Yue Yu sees enormous potential for genomic prediction to accelerate plant breeding — and an equally important challenge in everything that happens before those genetics reach the farm. Plant breeding is getting faster. Genomic prediction can help identify promising plants before breeders spend years evaluating them. Better computing, environmental data and genomic tools are giving researchers information that previous generations of breeders simply didn’t have. But there’s a catch: breeding a

On this week’s Seed World podcast, McGill University PhD candidate Neha Paserkar explains how genomics, transcriptomics and climate research are helping breeders develop disease-resistant crops for the future. As climate change reshapes growing conditions around the world, scientists are beginning to ask a question that could have major implications for agriculture: Will crops defend themselves against disease the same way they do in the future as they do today? That’s the focus of the latest