When plant breeders Nickerson acquired the Advanta business, they added a wheat breeding programme whose successes included Xi19, Zebedee and Solstice to their existing programme that was responsible for market-leading varieties such as Claire, Einstein and Alchemy.

“For us it was a win-win decision to get the synergy from two very different but complementary approaches to wheat breeding,” said Bill Angus, Nickerson’s senior wheat breeder. “Our programme is based on single seed descent and we have now added in the technical benefits of the latest marker assisted selection and doubled haploid techniques.”

You don’t need to be a plant breeder or understand the technology of the two approaches to see our reasoning,” he explained.  “All you need to know is that the two programmes take the best of our tried and tested traditional methods and give us the facility to target specific agronomic and quality traits.  Also we are able to speed up the time it takes for a variety to go from a gleam in a breeder’s eye to commercial crops in farmers’ fields. “

A simple example of how agronomic advances are speeded up is the Nickerson wheat breeding team’s work on developing varieties that combine milling quality with orange wheat blossom midge (OWBM) resistance.  OWBM is a sporadic problem - a big issue one year - not so the next.  So having a breeding programme that relied on seasonally-variable field selection of resistant plants was not ideal.  Now breeders can simply tag the relevant genes so that they can spot them in the lab.  In this way the company believes it is getting close to its goal of introducing a potential Group 1 wheat variety with OWBM resistance.

The same benefits in breeding work are seen when quality improvements are the objective - whether for existing milling and biscuit-making markets or for the emerging bioethanol market.  Hard Group 4 wheats are traditionally poorer for alcohol production and, particularly if they have the 1B/1R gene, are unlikely to find a home in bioethanol plants.  Again, it is now possible to focus plant breeding efforts on the soft Group 4 wheats whilst selecting out the 1B/1R gene.

“Soft Group 4 wheat varieties such as Alchemy and Istabraq - and their successors now in the breeding programme - are suitable for bioethanol production, opening up new market opportunities for growers,” added Mr Angus.