04

Meet the Bold and the Fearless

As the saying goes, “all pre-breeders are breeders but not all breeders are pre-breeders”. Working with crop wild relatives (CWR) in breeding programs is challenging and many breeders don’t have the time nor the resources to do it. This is where pre-breeders can help them.

Pre-breeder
Breeder
the breeder and the pre-breeder

  1. The Focus:
    The focus of the pre-breeder is not to release new varieties in the market, but to make it easier for plant breeders to incorporate new diversity into their breeding programs.

  2. The Focus:
    The focus of breeders is to develop new elite varieties for official release by national authorities.

  3. Materials:
    Pre-breeders work with less-developed materials, like crop wild relatives and landraces, crossing these with elite varieties to introduce new diversity for traits such as pest or disease resistance or heat and drought tolerance that is not already available.

  4. Materials:
    Breeders usually work with more advanced materials such as elite varieties, crossing them to produce new ones that meet farmers’ and consumers’ requirements. Sometimes, however, they use pre-breeding products as parents in their crossing programs, because they are the only source of the trait they need.

  5. From Lab to Field:
    They do this by identifying crop wild relatives or landraces with interesting traits and performing the first, often difficult-to-make, crosses with elite varieties.

  6. From Lab to Field:
    The new plants breeders produce have to be tested in field trials over several years and in different environments to ensure they perform well in the real world and better than other varieties. This often involves working closely with farmers to make sure they meet their needs.

  7. Shaping Perfection:
    They often have to cross the offspring of these initial crosses with the elite parent several times, to produce plants that have most of the characteristics of the elite variety but also the desired trait from the wild relative.

  8. Shaping Perfection:
    They also have to be distinct from other varieties and uniform and stable to be registered as new elite varieties for official release. This requires rigorous testing by government authorities.

Meet our scientists

The Bold and the Fearless

Working with CWR is challenging and time-consuming. The scientists who work with them are a special “breed” in themselves, and as diverse as the plants they work with. Here we meet some of the pre-breeders working with the BOLD Project.

    It takes more
    than a (global) village…

    Working with crop wild relatives (CWR) to improve varieties in farmers’ fields takes a veritable army of people with a wide range of skills and knowledge. Here are just a few of them: 
    There are many more, of course, from geneticists trying to identify new resistance genes to the extension agents who help farmers get the best out of the new varieties to improve their livelihoods.

    So, now you know something about the history of agriculture and the role of plant breeding in delivering our modern crops and what BOLD is doing to build on this legacy. And you have met some of the people working with BOLD to make more genetic diversity available to breeders and farmers. Now it is time to

    learn more about the SEVEN CROPS that we are working on.

    Games & challenges

    Play & Test Your Knowledge

    To the next chapter

    The Food Security and Nutritional Crops We Are Working With