BIO profile: Brian Whan, Molecular Plant Breeding CRC

When the Victorian Department of Agriculture's Werribee research farm advertised for a 'Semi-Dwarf Wheat Breeder' in the early 1970s, Bryan Whan applied -- his qualifications measured up, even if his height exceeded specification.

Whan got the job of bringing the Green Revolution to Victoria, hybridising local wheat varieties to the highly productive semi-dwarf wheats developed by Nobel laureate Prof Norman Borlaug at the International Maize and Wheat Breeding Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico.

"I was working with all the new breeding material coming into Australia, and realising that their shorter stature gave them a lot of potential in high-rainfall, as well as drier areas," Whan says.

During this time, Whan obtained a PhD in breeding methodologies at the Waite Research Institute in Adelaide. "It was a time when wheat breeding was moving away from traditional methods. It was being mechanised and computerised, and the number of breeding lines was increasing."

Today, as director of the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Molecular Plant Breeding in Melbourne, Whan is still involved in wheat breeding -- and CIMMYT is a partner in the CRC in the dawning age of transgenic wheats.

Whan describes the CRC, headquartered at La Trobe University's commercial R&D park in Bundoora, as a joint venture. Core partners are the Victorian Department of Primary Industry, the University of Adelaide, the South Australian Research and Development Institute, WA's Murdoch University, the WA Department of Agriculture -- and CIMMYT.

"They really put major resources into the CRC, and share the benefits," Whan says. "When we started, their total in-kind contribution was around $15 million, and our discretionary cash budget was around $6.8 million, plus another $3 million in competitive research grants."

Whan predicts when the current round of Commonwealth funding ends in 2009 (??) the CRC will have a budget of around $50 million. Two roads lead to the new horizon in cereal breeding, and the CRC us using both equally: the molecular-marker route opens up short cuts through familiar terrain, while the transgenic route goes via wild, unexplored territory.

The CRC is a world leader in the application of DNA markers to conventional breeding of wheat, barley and pasture-grasses. Its breeders no longer need play Mendelian roulette, or Guess-the-Genotype.

Molecular markers now allow them to track genes of known function, slashing the time involved in assembling the allelic pieces of polygenic traits in a single line: genes for disease resistance, abiotic stressors like drought and boron toxicity, quality traits, and milling and malting characteristics.

Now, says Whan, even before making a cross in the glasshouse, the CRC's breeder can explore the outcome in silico, with powerful simulation software developed by its in-house IT experts.

"I can see a future where wheat breeders will be able to sit down at a computer, with all the molecular information, and see whether the cross they are contemplating will produce the quality characteristics they want.

"As a traditional breeder, if you wanted to improve something like baking-dough quality in your lines, you had to grow them in many plots at many sites for many years. You'd harvest the grain, and put it through baking tests for several more years, until you were confident you had what you were looking for.

"Now, if you have a molecular marker, you sample a leaf from the seedling, extract the DNA, probe it, and you know immediately whether the gene you want is there.

"In our wheat and barley breeding programs, we now routinely screen 20-30,000 lines using molecular markers."

During his time breeding wheat in Victoria, and later in Western Australia, Whan says he made many crosses that he now realises could never have worked.

"The value of these technologies is that you can develop new varieties in only half the time, and improve traits that were simply impossible before. Take frost tolerance -- it's extremely difficult to breed for it, because you might not get enough frosts during field testing, and frost tolerance varies with maturity."

Whan says CIMMYT is currently field testing a new barley from Adelaide University, with resistance to cereal cyst nematode. With marker technology, it took only seven years to develop -- half the normal time.

With transgenic breeding, breeders are no longer constrained to fish in the gene pools of wheat, barley and their kissing cousins; oceans of genetic diversity, from plants, animals and microbes, await.

"In the longer term we'll be seeing even bigger impacts through GM wheats -- we'll be able to do things we could never have done with conventional breeding."

A drought-tolerant wheat now being tested at CIMMYT is a good example of that potential, says Whan -- it contains the dreb gene from Arabidopsis, which confers phenomenal resistance to water stress.

Disease resistance genes from unrelated plant species, or synthetic virus-resistance constructs can now be spliced into cereals and grasses.

Researchers at Southern Cross University in Lismore, NSW, an associate partner in the CRC, developed a transgenic form of the bane of hayfever sufferers -- annual ryegrass -- in which the offending allergen, the LolP1 protein in pollen, has been inactivated. It's now being field-trialled for the first time, at CIMMYT.

"We've got opportunities to use genes from other plants to create cereals and pasture grasses that will be have greater tolerance of acid soils and salt. We can start thinking about entirely new types of wheat, barley and pasture grasses that will improve our industries."

But Whan says while the blue-sky opportunities are limitless, the CRC's work is well grounded in practical realities. "Ultimately, our breeding programs are for our partners and clients.

"We were established by a group of industries -- representatives from the Australian Wheat Board, Australian Barley Board, the Grains Research and Development Council, pulse groups told us what their industries wanted. Our mandate crops are wheat, barley, oats, pasture grasses and legumes. We didn't want to be the CRC for Everything."

Despite this, the CRC's industry founders recognised its skills and capabilities could be applied to other crops -- if support is forthcoming, it's ready to undertake intensive projects for urgent problems in, say, the chickpea or canola industries.