b'Plant Breeding: Art or Science?Office-bound plant breeders would miss the anomalies that can be really important and informative. Joe FunkGIVEN A LARGE ENOUGHbrush, you could paint mostat their desks and never go to the field, they will miss the events groups with one of two colors. In prehistoric times, peoplethat fall outside the model. They would miss the anomalies that were either hunters or gatherers. In the Broadway musicalcan be really important and informative.Oklahoma!, settlers were either farmers or plowmen. In mostA lot of times, those anomalies are the thing that you need to of Western civilization, people tend to have either a scientificfollow up on.Maybe that one plant or that line is doing really well or artistic perspective on life. The scientist-types look for order,is an environment where you did not expect, says Fritz. That is seek structure in their lives and abide by the rules. Artists, well,why you need to follow up to see why one plant is succeeding not so much. They tend to more often want to color outsidewhen others are failing. Plant breeders certainly have different the lines and are less distressed by chaos. Plant breeders are aperspectives. The older breeders may rely more on their experi-mix of both types, with the trend gradually shifting toward theence, their innate knowledge of the crop and their observational scientific side. powers. I think most breeders lean on both, but we are tendingIncreasingly, as we are applying more genomic tools, we areto lean more toward science with our sequencing capacity.applying more science, so I would say the pendulum is definitelyBreeding is in a state of transition. There are certainly ele-swinging to a higher and higher percentage of science, explainsments of art there. We dont have the capacity to genotype a Allan Fritz, a wheat breeder at Kansas State University. Butmillion plants in our segregation populations in our early genera-there is still an element of art that is in play. tions, so when we are making selections on these, we are still Paul Morano, head of NA Cereals for Syngenta, agrees themaking a lot of judgment calls that are some combination of pendulum is swinging. art and science. There is still a critical need to be in the field and There are those who want to be 100% art-driven and theybe observational, but we apply the tools of science to drive the may be missing out on some of the plant breeding tools andgenetic gain to make us more efficient in our selection practices, technologies that are available, Morano says. And then thereFritz says.are those that say the tools can do the whole job. They make theAndrew Green, assistant professor and hard spring wheat claim that anyone can do it. I think that is a misconception. I thinkbreeder at North Dakota State University, also sees plant breed-you have to have a combination of both. Like anything else, thereers are shifting to a more science-based approach.are always both sides of the bell curve. The technology and toolsI think that we are finding more clever ways to use science that are available today compared to what was available 15 or 20to apply the art of plant breeding. As we have developed more years ago are so much greater that they allow us to do so manyadvanced molecular tools, we have found better ways to get to more things. the art portion, he says. If all plant breeders did was to sit at Every breeder evaluates plants a little differently and seestheir desks, I dont know how successful they would be. There is things from a different perspective. There are nuances, but therestill a lot of art. In the marketplace, a variety has to have the right appears to be a trend toward higher levels of dependence onlook and smell to be preferred by producers.SWscience. Prediction models are great, but if breeders always sit 30/ SEEDWORLD.COMJUNE 2020'