August 10, 2021
Climate change, land use, environmental sustainability, plant and animal health are all serious challenges facing BC’s agrifoods sector. The sector also faces increased market competition through globalization. However, these challenges offer opportunities to advance innovation and competitiveness to those who can address them.
Genome BC is catalyzing partnerships and knowledge transfer, increasing sector sustainability and competitiveness to exploit new business opportunities to drive the agrifoods sector. By consulting with stakeholders not only in BC’s agrifoods sector but across Canada, Genome BC is working to understand how genomics can maximize economic and social benefits. And BC researchers have already demonstrated that genomics can support competitive domestic and international markets for BC’s agrifoods products:
- Routine molecular testing for plant viruses is time consuming, laborious and requires individual analysis for each species. By using next generation sequencing, plant breeders and nurseries can detect all viruses present in a single plant sample, including those not routinely tested. This will ensure plants shipped abroad are virus-free and will keep markets open for fruit and crops from BC and Canada.
- Infectious diseases are a leading cause of illness in livestock and result in direct economic losses to producers and potentially disastrous international trade restrictions. As mentioned earlier in this report, there is also the potential for direct transfer of disease from animals to people. Managing and monitoring zoonotic diseases is essential for a healthy planet.
- The use of new breeding approaches involving genomic selection will enable the development of hardier plants better adapted to future provincial climate challenges without loss of plant yield. Sunflower is an ideal model system for studying plant adaptation to climate change. By investigating the molecular and physiological basis of wild sunflower’s adaptations to stress, breeders will be able to transfer these stress resistance traits to elite sunflower cultivars and use similar approaches in other agriculturally important crops.
For the agrifoods sector to remain internationally competitive and environmentally sustainable in the long term, it is imperative to diversify and adopt innovative technologies that will allow our province to deliver unique products for a local and global market. Today, Genome BC’s foundational investment in genomics applications in agrifoods, combined with ongoing international research, is driving the next stage of translational research in all areas of food production and processing.
This article appears in Genome BC’s 2020/21 Annual Report.
View the whole report here.
