Marc Zienkiewicz sits down with Katy Navabi, Nuseed’s North America canola breeding leader, at the recent grand opening of NRGene’s new office in Saskatoon, Sask., to talk genomics and how it’s changing the canola landscape.
Nuseed — which has developed traits for customers across Australia, Europe, and North and South America — first collaborated with NRGene in 2019 when Nuseed became part of the International Canola Pan-genome Consortium, meant to advance the rapeseed industry by capturing the crop’s broad genetic diversity. Nuseed contributed its own canola lines to the research and received the full pangenome comparison results.
“As Nuseed started to grow its breeding program in North America, we needed this kind of technology to develop molecular markers to help speed up our targeted selection. That said, I look at this partnership in a much longer-term way,” says Navabi.
“As we introduce more elite germplasm to our breeding, we have to be very familiar with that germplasm at the sequence level.”
