Ana Vargas was born in Costa Rica and spent her childhood there before moving to Nicaragua during her teenage years. When it was time to pursue higher education, she decided to embark on my own journey and moved to Honduras to earn her bachelor’s degree. It was there that I met her first mentor, a bean breeder who profoundly influenced her career path. Under his guidance, she completed her first undergraduate thesis, and this experience set the course for the rest of her journey.
She’s now the lentil and faba bean breeder at the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre (CDC) where she works with renowned pathologist Sabine Banniza. We caught up with Ana to talk her her work and how working with Banniza is helping usher in a new era for lentil and faba bean in Canada.
“One of the significant challenges in lentil breeding is combining multiple traits into a single cultivar. Currently, root rot disease is a major issue we are tackling, alongside air recite tolerance and the need to develop high-yielding varieties with these new traits. The art of breeding involves integrating all these traits into one successful cultivar,” she says.
Collaboration is everything for a breeder, and she’s fortunate to have excellent collaborators and experienced colleagues. Dr. Sabina Banniza, for instance, has dedicated her career to studying foliar diseases in lentils, particularly anthracnose. Her work has been instrumental in identifying sources of resistance to this significant disease. For Vargas, it’s a matter of utilizing the resources she has developed.
