A sexless union to bear great fruit
This five year humanitarian project will develop tools to generate self-reproducing hybrid cowpea and sorghum crops to help millions of farmers become more self sufficient with higher yielding crops.
“Our aim is to develop high-yielding sorghum and cowpea crops from which seeds can be saved and grown by smallholder farmers without loss of yield or quality.”
Dr Anna Koltunow, CSIRO Project Leader
CSIRO will use the grant to partner with other world leading research teams from Switzerland, USA, Germany and Mexico to achieve this goal.
“Sorghum and cowpea originated in Africa and are important staple food crops, but suffer from low yields,” CSIRO Project Leader Dr Anna Koltunow said.
“Our aim is to develop high-yielding sorghum and cowpea crops from which seeds can be saved and grown by smallholder farmers without loss of yield or quality.
“Hybrids in commercial farming systems can increase yield by 30 per cent or even more, because of a phenomenon known as heterosis or hybrid vigour. However, hybrid seed needs to be recreated and purchased each year and current technologies to produce hybrid seed are expensive.”
The creation of self-reproducing hybrid cowpea and sorghum crops would allow smallholder farmers to self-harvest high-quality seed to provide a more secure food supply and potentially increase income through the sale of surplus harvest and seed.
“It’s not going to be easy otherwise it would have been done already. The idea of changing the plants’ reproductive process to an asexual one is a complex undertaking,” Dr Koltunow said.
The initial stage of the project will be devoted to developing the techniques to enable cowpea and sorghum plants to reproduce asexually and is laboratory based. If this stage is successful, later phases will bring African breeders and institutes into the project.
Dr Anna Koltunow and her team are based at the CSIRO laboratories on the Waite Campus in Adelaide.
Learn more about the Capturing Heterosis project.
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Cowpeas are a staple food and an important source of protein for over 200 million people in sub-Saharan Africa.
Cowpeas originated in Africa but suffer from low yields.
Cowpeas are an important food crop in sub-Saharan Africa but yields are often reduced by more than 80 per cent due to pests and diseases.
The team aims to capture heterosis (hybrid vigour) in cowpea and sorghum crops. | Alt text: diagram showing the current hybrid technology where a male and female plant is crossed to produce a first generation hybrid offspring which out performs its parents. If the seed of this offspring is saved and sown there is a loss in yield and quality through trait segregation. The team’s goal is to capture heterosis by crossing two parents to produce a first generation hybrid offspring which self-reproduces thus preserving the higher yield and quality traits for subsequent generations.