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Episode transcription:
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Drew Lyon: Hello, welcome to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. I’m your host, Drew Lyon, and I want to thank you for joining me as we explore the world of small grains production and research at Washington State University. In each episode, I speak with researchers from WSU and the USDA-ARS to provide you with insights into the latest research on wheat and barley production.
If you enjoy the WSU Wheat Beat podcast, do us a favor and subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast app and leave us a review so others can find the show too.
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My four guests today include Dr. Arron Carter. Arron is a professor and the Orville Vogel Endowed Chair of Winter Wheat Breeding and Genetics at WSU. His breeding program focuses on the development of high-yielding, high-quality wheat varieties with resistance to both biotic and abiotic stresses in Washington production regions. Hello, Arron.
Dr. Arron Carter: Hi, Drew. Good to be here today.
Drew Lyon: Yeah, nice to have you here.
Dr. Mike Pumphrey is professor of spring wheat breeding and genetics at WSU. His breeding program focuses on the development of high-yielding, high-quality and pest- and disease-resistant spring wheat varieties for diverse Washington production environments. Hello, Mike.
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: Hi, Drew.
Drew Lyon: And Dr. Robert Brueggeman is the WSU barley breeder and the Robert A. Nilan Endowed Chair in Barley Research and Education. His molecular research objectives are utilizing genetic and genomic technologies for quality and stress resistance breeding applications. Hello, Bob.
Dr. Bob Brueggeman: Hello, Drew.
Drew Lyon: And Dr. Kim Garland-Campbell is a research geneticist in the USDA-ARS Wheat Health, Genetics, and Quality Research Unit in Pullman. Her research focuses on genetic improvement of wheat to reduce grower risk and improve marketability and end-use quality. She has the distinction of being the only wheat breeder who has a primary focus on Club wheat. Hello, Kim.
Dr. Kim Garland-Campbell: Hi, Drew.
Drew Lyon: So, it’s fun to have all four of you here sitting down at one time to discuss wheat breeding. Your work is very important to the wheat industry in this state and you all do a great job, and so I wanted to see if I could get you all here and start talking about plant breeding and some of the changes you’ve seen over your careers.
I know during my Ph.D. at Nebraska, I was trying to find herbicide tolerance in dry edible beans, so I took a couple genetics courses back in the 80s. And then, I became a dryland crops person and a weed scientist, and I came back to Pullman in 2012 and I started going to seminars and listening to students talk about breeding and I didn’t understand the word they were saying. So, in that, what, 30 years, genetics, as I had learned it in the 80s, had totally changed. So, I’m kind of curious what changes you’ve seen and how breeding has changed during your careers and, yeah, just a little bit about that to start our discussion off. It’s a totally different world than it was not that long ago, and it seems like almost every year or two, there’s a new technology that brings another tool into your toolbox. So, who would like to start off discussing that?
Dr. Arron Carter: I think I’ll start off. I think one of the things that has been advancing a lot is just our understanding of genetics and some of the genetic technologies that we have. You know, when I was a grad student about 17, 18 years ago and I was needing to run DNA markers, you know, I was happy to move from a single channel pipette that would pull one sample at a time to a 12-channel pipette, right, that would move 12 at a time–and to be able to and to go from analyzing 96 samples at a time to 384 at a time. Right? That was the big jump for me at the time. Granted, it still took me six months to collect all the DNA marker information that I needed.
And now, with robots, with newer technology, we’re moving samples, you know, 96 at a time with robots helping us do the work. Instead of six months, we can analyze, you know, a couple thousand markers in a week. And so, we’re just able to get a lot more information quickly with these robots helping us in the process. We’re doing it more efficiently, more accurately, so we can just get a lot of that information more quickly to help us understand the genetics, what genes are in the breeding lines that we’re looking at, and it allows us to do some more sophisticated analysis–actually looking at prediction of performance based on the genetics of a line in untested environments. So, that’s one thing I’ve seen that’s been a big increase over the past, you know, 15 years that I’ve been here.
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: One thing I would add, Drew, based on the timeline that you mentioned, is PCR or polymerase chain reaction was invented or discovered in the 1980s when you were taking those genetics courses, so all of this molecular revolution that we’re seeing today is the result of being able to amplify DNA through that really simple discovery, you know, back when you were a young tyke getting started.
Dr. Kim Garland-Campbell: Yeah. When I, you know, I was in school with Drew–not at Nebraska, I was at North Carolina State—and in fact, we not only had a single channel pipette, we only had a pipette that did one [milliliter], you know, that was it, and we had to gauge everything off of that. But I think a lot of things have changed.
Another thing I’d like to point out is that the combines when I was an undergrad actually at Colorado State, the wheat breeder then, Jim Welsh, took us out to the field and showed off this brand new thing called a plot combine that this guy up in Washington state named Orville Vogel had just put together, and he thought that was really going to revolutionize wheat breeding.
And, you know, I have Vogel’s old field books in my lab, and they harvested everything they did by sickles in single rows, you know, and then they would–so all the field books have a data point for each row that they harvested. And, it really limited their ability to do a lot of multi-location work. And now our modern combines, you know, we also have harvest systems on the combines, like the farmers do actually, that give us the yield as we go and give us the test weight and the protein data, and we’re not, you know–it’s really created a lot of efficiency at harvest, especially in a place like this where we have to turn the crop around so fast.
Dr. Bob Brueggeman: Yeah. And I think going back to Arron’s comments on how fast the marker technology has moved forward has really revolutionized our ability to discover actual genes’ underlying traits. Like back in my graduate school days, we were up to our armpits and P32 radiation took eight years to discover a gene, if you were lucky. And today, you can have grad students that can go from making the first cross to be able to identify candidate genes within months, and then at that point, we’re able to develop perfect markers. And so, we have markers in our panels that actually track the gene that’s contributing to that trait directly, rather than having markers that are quite a ways away from the gene. So, it’s been quite interesting in the last decade, actually, how fast things have moved forward.
Drew Lyon: Okay. So, lots of changes, an accelerating rate of change. What hasn’t changed about plant breeding, anything? Or is it a totally different game than it used to be?
Dr. Kim Garland-Campbell: No, I think the things that–the couple things that–this is another Vogel thing, he says to be a good plant breeder, you have to, you know, make the best crosses and always know what the farmers want. And I think that’s true. We have to know what the industry needs and wants, and we have to figure out ways to create the right population so we can find it.
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: The time it takes to grow the crop hasn’t changed a whole lot. And so that’s, you know, when we factor in the rate of genetic gain and how quickly we can change a variety or new varieties to better adapt, time is critical. We do have, you know, better greenhouse facilities and things like that that have improved that timeliness, but we’re still limited by how long it takes for a crop to grow. You plant winter wheat here in August through October and you harvest in July through August.
Drew Lyon: Anything else? Kim brought up the point of knowing what the farmers want and Mike brought up how long, you know, it takes to move things along. How do you figure out what farmers really want? Because what they might want today might not be what they want, what five, six, seven years down the road when you finally release these varieties. Do you have you have methodologies on how you go about figuring that out?
Dr. Arron Carter: I think it’s a combination of a lot of things. I mean, we’ve always had a good relationship with our growers, our stakeholders, with the commissioners, and the Washington Grain Commission, and our export markets as well. So, we get a lot of input there with that good relationship on what’s needed, kind of where markets are headed, what might be coming up.
You know, and then, you know, we talk with our colleagues across the globe, and just kind of hear what they’re dealing with. You know, is there a, you know, new disease in South America that’s starting to poke its head around that might eventually make it our way. Or, you know, something like that. Working with pathologists, entomologists, kind of seeing like what are the different insect or fungal pests doing and how are they evolving. So, I think as we interact with not only our stakeholders and our markets, but our colleagues and other experts in their respective fields, then we start to get a feel, I think, of what might be coming forward. You know, you and I and Ian Burke have talked a lot about herbicide resistance and what’s that looking like in weed populations and where do we need to go with herbicide tolerance, so as we have those kind of conversations it can also gauge.
But yeah, part of it’s just looking in that crystal ball and trying to make that best guess with all that input on what might be the future so that we can start thinking about making crosses, getting certain traits into our germplasm, so that we could be responsive if that disease or pest or issue ever showed up in Washington.
Dr. Bob Brueggeman: And I think on the barley side, it’s even more difficult with the market volatility we’re seeing with barley, the loss of the feed market. Now we’re seeing a decline in the malt market. So, where we’re going ahead is–the crystal ball is very unclear, so I think it’s going to be a lot of looking at niche varieties, adding value-added traits like biofortification and things, not only in the feed lines, but moving more towards food, because food, it looks like the market is gaining traction, whereas in malt and feed barley we’re seeing it lose, so it’s a difficult time right now.
Drew Lyon: Okay, I was just going to ask each one of you to put your prognosticators hat on and kind of tell us where you think your particular niches or markets are going. Maybe not so much markets, but where is winter wheat, where do you see it going in the next 5, 10 years? Spring wheat? Club wheat? Who wants to take that on first? Bob’s already kind of given us a preview on the barley side.
Dr. Kim Garland-Campbell: Well, I think—I was just listening to the Grain Commission meeting before I came over here and the various commissioners when they were talking about their districts, the theme that came through often is, you know, the prices aren’t great and growers are reducing their inputs because inputs costs are going up all the time. They don’t stay static. And, I think that we are being asked a lot to provide crops that are pretty resilient, you know, that can handle lower inputs or that can handle some stress. And, the herbicide-resistant wheats are a good example of that, too. And I think that’s going to continue to the extent that we can do that and going forward it’s just going to—you know, one of the things I like about working with Club wheat is at least we’ve had a long-term stable market to Japan and other parts of Asia. They value the product. It already is a niche product, but they value it and they keep coming back for it and in our conversations with them, they indicate that they don’t see that changing. So, we need to meet their requirements and then if we can always keep something pretty resilient so that, you know, a grower could go out there and plant it and not have to put a lot of additional inputs like extra fungicide and things on it. They could be guaranteed of having a decent possibility at a market. Maybe not the crop year. Maybe it’ll take a year, you know, to get the price to where they want it, but that’s kind of what I think we have to work on.
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: I think what Bob mentioned about barley and looking at nutrition and value added as far as food for human consumption, not feed, I think that’s largely true of what we’re going to see increasing, specialization in wheat varieties as well.
We’ve got quite an effort going on these days to try to build a greater knowledge bank of information on the sort of overall nutritional profile of specific wheat varieties, of types of wheat, of individual components in that wheat, potentially new product uses. I think that, you know, human consumption part and overall, you know, demonstrating or quantifying how much wheat and small grains and whole grains contribute to human, you know, nutrition and health is going to be something we see a lot more of.
Drew Lyon: Arron, what about the winter wheat area? What do you see happening there?
Dr. Arron Carter: I mean, I agree with what all my colleagues have said as well. You know, as we’ve talked previously, I’m putting additional focus in developing herbicide tolerance. Yeah, it seems to be one of our number one, you know, pests to try and control and a lot of our herbicides are failing us. So, working a lot on that.
And then I think just to add, that kind of fits in to what’s been said about stability and, you know, even thinking about, you know, nutrition and what the plant can grab from the soil, is thinking a lot about the environment and really understanding more about the environment. I tend to generalize. It was a cold, wet spring. It was a hot, dry summer. Right? But, really dialing that in more to see when, you know, when rain might come and how plants are taking advantage of that. If we do get that, you know, 2/10ths, 3/10ths of an inch in the middle of June and how plants are able to respond to that so that we can develop these lines that are more resilient to the changes in climate that we see from year to year and from, you know, location to location. So, it’s another thing, I think, that has been relatively, you know, left out of the equation, but I think we could dial in a lot more on what that environment is and how different lines are actually responding to that environment and really get the specifics.
Drew Lyon: Okay. I thought maybe I’d ask each of you to tell our listeners, what’s the most exciting thing going on in your program currently or that you see coming in the very near future that gets you excited to come into work and see how it’s going to turn out.
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: You know, the one technology that for me, you know, based on the current regulatory environment, based on, you know, the potential going forward, is gene editing or, you know, specifically editing genes directly rather. You mentioned herbicide resistance and mutations and, you know, finding those sort of mutations is a one in a million kind of game. When you can go in and target that change based on prior knowledge, then it becomes much more tractable to actually use it in plant breeding. So, whether we’re talking about disease resistance, nutrition, nitrogen-use efficiency, herbicide tolerance, if we know the underlying genes, which we can discover much more readily as Bob mentioned a bit ago, you know, being able to go in and directly target those and produce new varieties faster excites me a lot.
Drew Lyon: Okay. And is that something that you’re starting to work with or that you think you will soon be starting to work with?
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: You know, when you say you, I mean, I’m kind of going to take the royal approach, and I would say the industry as a whole is. We do have specific collaborations involving gene editing for specific traits at present, but, you know, so yes and yes–but I think it’s going to be industry wide, it’s not just my research program.
Drew Lyon: Okay.
Dr. Arron Carter: Yeah. I think that’s something that, you know–and we’ve already had a lot of discussions with the Grain Commission, with growers about what that would look like. Talking a lot to our export markets about gene editing, because, yeah, I think that is definitely an area of great potential as we go forward as we understand more about the genetics and the genes controlling these. To be able to take, you know, a variety that already exists and make that single change in it to potentially turn, you know, your favorite variety into a herbicide tolerant variety, you know, right, that saves just a lot of time. Instead of taking years to make the crosses, introgress the trait, and return it back to something that meets expectations, we can more rapidly change. Change the one. So, yeah, technology wise, I would say that’s probably one of the most exciting that can be coming down. I mean, again, a lot of regulations around it, a lot of discussions that still need to go on and a lot of genes that still need to be identified, right? We still need to understand a lot more about the genetics. But, yeah, what we could do with that technology is pretty impressive.
Drew Lyon: So, I think the other aspect that may have to be dealt with is educating the public about the technology and what it does or doesn’t do. I know there’s still a lot of anti-GMO ideas out there and–any thoughts on how that is done? It’s probably something everybody needs to be involved in.
Dr. Arron Carter: Yeah, I mean, from my standpoint, probably our standpoint, we just–we keep talking about it. You know, keep answering questions, keep bringing it up in discussion, keep talking about it so the people understand, right? It’s one thing that maybe, you know, we probably don’t do as well in science as we should is communicate what we’re doing out to the general public. We communicate really well with each other as scientists, but a little less to the general public.
And so, again, I think a lot of just continuing to answer those questions, you know. We’re present at field days, we’re present at grower meetings, at commission meetings, and we’ll often get asked these questions. And that’s where I find, you know, most effectively, we’re able to respond to that and help educate.
You know, there’s been some popular press that’s been out there, some Wheat Life articles that are out about gene editing and the differences between that and GMO. So, that’s probably one of the biggest things we can do right now is just keep talking about it.
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: And it’s a priority for the Washington Grain Commission. You know, the CEO Casey Chumrau and others have been out, you know, talking specifically on those issues. And we’ve supported and kind of backstopped them with whatever technical knowledge is needed for those kind of discussions.
Dr. Bob Brueggeman: And, just getting it out there and emphasizing the fact that gene editing is not GMO. I mean, you’re not bringing in any foreign DNA, you’re just changing things and we’ve been using mutational breeding to do the same thing, as Mike had mentioned, but instead of having to screen millions of lines, we’re able to do it directly.
Dr. Kim Garland-Campbell: Yeah. I think the–actually for an example that kind of ties a couple of these threads together, you know, we’d all like to eat more whole wheat products. I think, whole wheat, if we would just eat more whole wheat products, that would solve a lot of issues in our diets–or whole grain products, not just whole wheat products. And one of the problems specifically with wheat, whole wheat flour, is it tends to go rancid faster than white flour, and therefore it’s not as shelf stable and products made from it aren’t as shelf stable. And, we can edit out some of the lipid genes that are responsible for that.
And, it’s been done in other crops like soybeans, you know. We know what genes to target. We can go in with CRISPR and do it. We can also do it through mutation breeding. We can also just screen all the germplasm we have and look for natural mutations, you know, so we have–it’s really cool right now because we have these multiple approaches to trying to solve a problem.
And then the other really great thing we have here is we have collaborations amongst each other, but also with the Western Wheat Quality Lab and the people there, and with Phil Bates and IBC who works on lipids, you know, so we have the technology and the expertise here that we can put together ideas and projects and actually kind of know how to do the work, you know.
Drew Lyon: I think that’s one of the things I find very exciting about the state of Washington. Coming from Nebraska, we had a wheat breeder. And, here we have a winter wheat breeder, a spring wheat breeder, a barley breeder, a Club wheat breeder, and that brings a lot of expertise to the breeding game. And I’ve watched you all work, you do collaborate amongst each other and amongst the different programs in the department and the college, and I think that just that brings a lot of strength to everybody’s program.
So, any last words before we say ado?
Dr. Mike Pumphrey: I’d just like to say, we, you know, sincerely appreciate and rely on the continued support of Washington growers, the University, USDA, and thank you.
Drew Lyon: Yeah, it’s a great place to work because the growers are very supportive and the industry’s supportive. I think, in turn, they get a lot of good support from the University.
Dr. Arron Carter: And, I think also just to reach out. Right? If growers have questions, if anybody–stakeholders have questions, anybody listening, we’re always available. I mean, I think that’s one of the reasons a lot of us are here in, you know, public institutions is we like doing the work, but we also like interacting with our stakeholders and, you know, being out in the field with them talking about their issues, too. So, we’re all available if, you know, people have questions. You know, we get phone calls all the time, emails that we respond to. So, just yeah, don’t worry about reaching out. We’re happy to answer questions and interact with the growers, because, yeah, ultimately they’re the ones supporting our programs and so we try and make ourselves available to them.
Drew Lyon: Yeah. We’ll make sure we get all your contact information in the show notes so if people do want to get in touch with you, they’ll know how to do that.
Well, all, thank you very much. I think this went pretty well. This is the most I’ve ever had at one time on my show and I enjoyed the interaction and the talk. And thanks for everything you do for the wheat industry here in the state of Washington. Appreciate having you on today.
All: Thanks, Drew.
Drew Lyon:
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Thanks for joining us and listening to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. If you like what you hear don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you have questions or topics you’d like to hear on future episodes, please email me at drew.lyon — that’s lyon@wsu.edu — (drew.lyon@wsu.edu). You can find us online at smallgrains.wsu.edu and on Facebook and Twitter [X] @WSUSmallGrains. The WSU Wheat Beat podcast is a production of CAHNRS Communications and the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.
I’m Drew Lyon, we’ll see you next time.
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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University’s endorsement.