30 GERMINATION.CA SEPTEMBER 2017 COMBINING BOTH ART and science, plant breed- ing has been practiced for thousands of years — more or less since the beginning of human civilization. Often described as changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics, plant breeding can be accomplished by many techniques—from simply selecting plants with desirable characteristics for propagation, to meth- ods that make use of the knowledge of genetics and chromosomes, to more complex molecular techniques. It’s practiced worldwide by everyone from gardeners and farmers to professional plant breeders employed with government institutions, universities, crop-specific industry associations and research centres. Kent Bradford is director of the Seed Biotechnology Center (SBC) at UC Davis, located in northern California, approximately 15 miles west of Sacramento. Essentially responsible for overseeing everything at the SBC — with the help of an outstanding staff — he says he won the “job lottery” by getting a position in plant sci- ences at UC Davis. “It has perfectly combined my academic/ scientific nature with my interest in farming and gardening and my wish to contribute to improv- ing crop production. What I like most is being able to provide valuable educational programs about seed and plant breeding to the seed indus- try, and see participants expanding their careers in the industry.” The Seed Biotechnology Center designed the UC Davis Plant Breeding Academy, looking to increase the supply of professional plant breed- ers to the industry. It also offers other pro- grams like Seed Business 101, Seed Production, Breeding with Genomics, Program Management for Plant Breeders, and Seed Biology and Quality. Many Changes, More Opportunities for Education The plant breeding industry has undergone a great transformation — particularly in the last decade — largely due to the virtually universal adoption of marker-assisted breeding methods. “The decreasing cost of genome sequencing has enabled the sequencing of many more crops, the development of genetic maps, and charac- terization of diversity and DNA-based markers that greatly improve the speed and specificity of plant breeding,” Bradford explains. “The abil- ity to use genetic engineering has been a major focus, along with marker-assisted and genomics- based methods, in the major agronomic crops — but the regulatory and marketing hurdles have largely stymied those methods in specialty crops in the last decade. Instead, they have moved heavily into marker-assisted methods.” Evan Gillis is a canola breeder at DL Seeds in Morden, Manitoba. In 2010, he started at the small seed company — which creates and pro- duces canola hybrid varieties — after completing a bachelor of science degree in agronomy and a master’s degree in plant pathology from the University of Manitoba. Over the past seven years, he says the big- gest change he has seen in the industry is the number of different traits or individual genes being worked on at a commercial level. “When I started, we were basically focused on a few herbicide tolerance traits and now we are Lisa Kopochinski is a freelance writer and editor with extensive experience writing about different issues — including horticulture and agriculture — in both Canada and the United States. PLANTBREEDING EDUCATIONTAKES MANYFORMS Over the past decade, plant breeding and biotechnology have been transformed — as a result, there are a variety of educational paths to be taken.