Canadian canola farmers and seed companies will soon have another tool in their fight against clubroot, courtesy of NRGene Green and its AI-powered crop breeding technology, following the company reporting field data results.
A subsidiary of Israel-based NRGene, NRGene Green developed a proprietary AI-based platform that predicts the genes needed to make canola resistant to clubroot, Masood Rizvi, GM for the company, told AgTechNavigator. The company fed the DNA sequences of 600 canola lines from around the globe — including Australia, Canada, and Europe — into its AI algorithm, which then instructs the company on how best to breed the plant to create a disease-resistant crop, he added.
Clubroot is a soil-borne disease that infects cruciferous plants, resulting in swollen roots and causing premature plant death, according to the Canola Council of Canada. Clubroot is “a threat to the canola industry” in Canada, as the disease can quickly spread from vehicles tracking infected soil from one field to another, Rizvi said.
Preparing for future clubroot strains
Typically, developing new crop lines with disease-resistant traits can take years, but AI is speeding up the process, Rizvi explained. Additionally, NRGene Green is ensuring that beneficial traits, including those related to yields, are not lost in the seed-breeding process, he added.
“If we do it in a natural way without using the artificial intelligence genomics, it will take at least a decade to synchronize those 600 lines and come up with the solution. But with AI genomics, you can do all this work within six months,” Rizvi elaborated.
“The idea was not to breed for today, but to breed for the future. We want to really work on something, which is robust and durable for a decade — at least — in the future."
Masood Rizvi, GM for NRGene Green
This year, NRGene Green conducted field trials across multiple breeding lines in both greenhouse and open-field tests. In its field trials, NRGene Green achieved zero clubroot infection for its advanced introgressed donor lines and a 0.2% infection rate for new hybrid varieties with clubroot-resistant traits, the company shared in a release.
Like any disease, clubroot is evolving, so NRGene Green wanted to develop a technology that can stay ahead of the disease, Rizvi said. To accomplish this, the company took a “multigenic approach” by focusing on five genes as opposed to one, which improves long-term disease resistance, he explained.
“The idea was not to breed for today, but to breed for the future. We want to really work on something, which is robust and durable for a decade — at least — in the future,” Rizvi added.
The resistant lines and molecular markers are available to commercial breeding programs and seed companies through licensing agreements, with NRGene Green already working with seed companies on commercially launching the technology. NRGene Green will focus first on Canadian canola farmers, before moving to the European market next year, Rivzi noted.
