Dr Matthew Nelson1, Mrs Jane Brownlee1, Mr Mark Cmiel2, Dr Andrew Fletcher1, Ms Natalie Fletcher1, Ms Trijntje Hughes2, Dr John Kirkegaard2, Dr Kenton Porker3, Ms Karen Treble1, Ms Kelley Whisson1, Dr Beata Sznajder4, Dr Greg Rebetzke2
1CSIRO, Floreat, Perth, Australia, 2CSIRO, Black Mountain, Canberra, Australia, 3CSIRO, Waite Campus, Adelaide, Australia, 4The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
Biography:
Dr Nelson leads the Adaptive Traits team at CSIRO in Perth, Western Australia. Having gained his PhD in crop genetics at the John Innes Centre (UK) in 2000, he worked as a molecular breeder in commercial crop breeding programs in The Netherlands and Australia, and as a crop geneticist and pre-breeder at the University of Western Australia and Royal Botanic Garden, Kew (UK). He joined CSIRO in 2018 to lead a national program of canola improvement. His research interests include canola adaptation (phenology and establishment), legume domestication and the effective use of wild germplasm in crop improvement.
Abstract:
Canola (Brassica napus L.) is Australia’s second most valuable grain crop and an important break crop in cereal-dominated rotations. However, canola suffers from unreliable establishment, which frequently leads to lost yield potential and increased management costs. The problem is being amplified by a changing climate and evolving farming systems, such as earlier sowing into hotter, drier soils. Sowing canola deeper (e.g. 50 mm) than the conventional sowing depths (15-20 mm) is one potential solution for avoiding extreme heat fluctuations experienced in the top 20 mm of soil and for better access to stored soil moisture. However, current Australian canola varieties are ill-suited to emerging from such deep sowing.
We have previously shown that Australian canola varieties (past and present) have uniformly short hypocotyls (that is, the stem between the root and cotyledons of seedlings). In contrast, overseas varieties have a wide range of hypocotyl lengths and those with long hypocotyls emerge better from deeper sowing. In 2023, GRDC and CSIRO co-invested in a five-year project (CSP2307-002RTX) that aims to: (1) transfer the long hypocotyl trait from overseas varieties into Australian varieties; (2) understand the genetics and physiology of the long hypocotyl trait; (3) develop with the canola industry a classification system using defined terminology to describe long hypocotyl varieties; and, (4) develop molecular markers to accelerate the commercial breeding of long hypocotyl canola varieties.
If successful, growers will in future have access to canola varieties that can emerge reliably from deep-sowing and establish effectively despite increasingly challenging growing conditions.