138 / SEEDWORLD.COM DECEMBER 2017 CLIPPER SEED CLEANERS Manufactures of Clipper grain and seed conditioning equipment. Utilizes standard Clipper screens, with over 150 different sizes available. Counter balanced shoes. Integral centrifugal blower. American made. Variable speed electronic vibratory feeder. Durable heavy-duty construction A.T. Ferrell Company, Inc. 1440 S. Adams St., Bluffton, IN 46714 800-248-8318 Fax 260-824-5463 www.atferrell.com Clipper In-house Screen Perforating Designed for long trouble-free service Available for many brands of seed cleaners The only screens engineered like a Clipper Engineered Without Compromise By A.T. Ferrell RESEARCHERS AT THE University of Wisconsin–Madison wanted to know whether the last 100 years of selecting for corn that is acclimated to particular locations has changed its ability to adapt to new or stressful environments. Writing Nov. 7 in Nature Communications, UW–Madison Professor of Agronomy Natalia de Leon, her student Joe Gage and colleagues at several institutions report that artificial selec- tion by crop breeders has constricted the pool of possibilities for North American corn varieties. They conclude that the existing corn varieties are strong and stable, but are less flexible in their ability to respond to various stresses. By intensively breeding for high yield, say, in Wisconsin, those plants might lose the flexibility to respond to environments that are very different from Wisconsin growing conditions. To test this idea, de Leon and her colleagues at 12 agricultural universities in the U.S. and Canada devised a large field trial with more than 850 unique corn varieties at 21 locations across North America. There were more than 12,000 total field plots where researchers measured traits like yield and plant height while recording weather conditions. De Leon and her collaborators found that the regions of the corn genome that have undergone a high degree of selection – for example, gene regions that contribute to high yield in a particular location – were associated with a reduced capacity of corn to respond to variable environments than genomic regions that weren’t directly acted on by breeders. The upshot is that the modern corn varieties are very productive in the environ- ments they are grown in, but might have a harder time handling changes in those environments. “The data seem to point to the idea that by selecting geno- types that are better suited to be more productive, we are erod- ing variability that might be important as we move into a world where climate might be more erratic and where we might need to move cultivars into places where they haven’t been grown before,” de Leon says. SW Source: University of Wisconsin–Madison BREEDING HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE CORN HAS REDUCED ITS ABILITY TO ADAPT University of Wisconsin–Madison opening a pool of possibilities