Recent Subprogramme 3 news:

• New Supbrogramme 3 Leader

The primary purpose of this subprogramme is to increase the efficiency, speed and scope of plant breeding. Our strategy to achieve this goal is to both adopt new technological advances and seek maximum synergy from combinations of the old and the new. The activities in this subprogramme require coordinated input from scientists of different disciplines, eco-regions and types of institution.

The development of effective systems for breeding complex traits - such as drought tolerance - has for the most part eluded researchers for 50 years, despite huge investments in research and development. The recent revolutions of genomics and bioinformatics offer real opportunities for dissecting drought tolerance into component traits and then developing tools to manipulate the underlying genes. Reconstructing effective drought traits will also require considerable advances in whole-plant physiology modeling to achieve the global impact we strive for.

Integrating the discoveries of Subprogrammes 1 and 2, Subprogramme 3 focuses on the validation and refinement of molecular breeding systems and the resulting enhanced germplasm. SP3's activities include:

• Creation of appropriate technologies for application of marker-assisted selection in national breeding programmes
  
• Technical assistance for breeding programmes to faciliate rapid and effective uptake of molecular breeding in tropical staple crops
  
• The development of communities of practice supported by regional centres of excellence and state-of-the-art technologies and approaches

To assure widespread impact of new genes and traits, the selection of appropriate background genotypes for molecular breeding programmes is critically important. SP3 collates, collects, and generates the most appropriate breeding lines for this purpose. An essential activity of Year 1 was to document baseline information for those varieties (including production and constraint mapping), which will be used in subsequent impact assessment studies.

GCP focuses on three crop groups: cereals, legumes and clonal crops. Research progress in the cereals indicates that gene-based marker systems for components of drought tolerance and other abiotic stresses will be developed and applied in all or most cereals. We expect that those advances will significantly impact progress in the other groups. We hope to further research in all crops with the generic facilitating technologies SP3 is developing, including standardised phenotyping protocols, whole-plant physiology modeling, molecular breeding simulation studies, and decision support tools. SP3 is also generating procedures for creating low-cost trait diagnostics and high-throughput, array-based genotyping systems. These activities will be carried out in collaboration with scientists in SP1, SP2, and SP4.