Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76SEPTEMBER 2016 SEEDWORLD.COM / 17 or the climate, but to a need for higher yield. It was prominent until the 1970s because it tasted good, and that was a sign of good nutrition to many people who worked for centuries to improve their foods through breeding and selection processes. “Landraces were shaped over long periods of time, and their antiquity goes back in some cases thousands of years. These grains were bred for flavor, because flavor was — in preliterate societies — the signature of nutrition. It was the assurance you were getting what you needed to survive,” Shields said. “You are getting the wisdom of a population that survived and grew wheat for a millennium or hundreds of years.” The Science of it All Purple Straw has the romantic story of a food lost and found, and could be a crop that offers economic opportunity for farm- ers. It also has, locked within itself, a host of genes that one won’t find within many of the modern hybrids that dominate wheat fields around the world. Lee Hickey, a research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Alliance for Agriculture & Food Innovation, tracks down landrace grains to find the genes that have been left behind. Standard breeding processes focus narrowly on specific traits, such as yield, and the genes that confer those traits are selected for. Others are lost. “There’s a lot of inbreeding, and if you’re not selecting for every single trait that might be important in the future, you might be losing genetic diversity for those traits,” Hickey said. Hickey is working with 300 wheat varieties from Russia that had been preserved in seed banks and comparing them with modern hybrids. He is seeing that the modern varieties have many genes in common, whereas the landraces have a much larger array of genes and novel alleles. “I’m interested in mining these old historical varieties for more useful genes to plug into modern varieties to make them stronger or more drought tolerant,” Hickey said. “They’re almost like a treasure chest of genetic diversity, essentially because they didn’t go through this intense selection breeding process we’ve gone through over the last 60 to 80 years.” Hickey said Purple Straw would be an interesting candidate because, like the others he studies, it has stood the test of time, and its genetics certainly played a role in that. “We face a great challenge in feeding a growing population of nine billion to 10 billion by 2050,” Hickey said. “At the current rate, we’re not on pace to meet those demands. We need more genetic diversity to tackle these problems, and these varieties are a great place to start.” SW “You’re kind of eating in a time machine. You’re nourishing yourself in another era.” — Glenn Roberts