World Leading Pulses

Canada is one of the worlds leading exporters of pulse crops like lentils and peas. In 2002, farmers here planted lentils on 1.48 million acres, while peas were planted on 3.2 million acres.

Many of these fields are sown with varieties developed at the Crop Development Centre. Here, Drs. Tom Warkentin, Bert Vandenberg and their colleagues work to improve yields and develop advanced plant breeding techniques like doubled haploid production. This technology, already in use in canola, allows breeders to bring new varieties to market much faster. Other advanced tools include marker-assisted selection, which uses genetic markers to identify desirable traits in plants. This allows breeders to better choose which plants have the best performance.

A relative newcomer to the Prairies, chickpea, poses special problems. The crop is susceptible to ascochyta blight, a fungal disease that is also the bane of lentils.

The CDC has the only Canadian chickpea breeding program, started in the mid-90s with material produced by collaborators in Washington State.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation provides funding for this program. CDC researchers have worked with plant breeding centres in the U.S., Australia, Turkey and Syria to identify varieties with blight resistance. So far, success has been limited, although the newest strains are rated as "fair" in resistance, which is a great improvement from the "poor" or worse ratings of older varieties. Warkentin explains the resistance genes may simply be missing from the chickpea genome, and they may have to explore wild plant relatives to eventually nail down this trait. The program is also looking at developing varieties that mature faster to better fit the short Canadian growing season.

Excerpt: Research Report 2003