Crop residues supply critically needed carbon (C) and nutrients to the soil. These residue-derived resources support plant growth and the formation of soil organic matter, a cornerstone of soil health.
This project aims to contribute to the development of elite canola varieties that are resistant to pathogen infection for the betterment of the canola industry.
This project will help improve canola production efficiency and improve the national and global competitiveness of the Canadian canola industry (in the long term).
Improving crop tolerance to drought is essential for maintaining yield stability under the continued threat of climate change and a key factor for achieving sustainability in agriculture by saving water resource usage. Molecular breeding focusing on monogenic transgenic intervention has so far achieved limited success in the development of drought tolerance in crops. This project focuses on a gene family that is the basis of quantitative trait loci (QTL) affecting drought tolerance in Brassicaceae.
This has the potential to open up plant breeding to a whole new way to identify germplasm variation in breeding programs.
Clubroot disease in canola and other brassicas is caused by the pathogen Plasmodiophora brassicae. Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan conducted a five-year study to identify and characterize effector proteins and their role in the establishment and progression of clubroot disease.
New sources of clubroot and blackleg resistance are needed in western Canada because virulent pathogen populations have been reported that are able to overcome the resistance of canola cultivars for both diseases.
Cultivar resistance is considered the most effective and practical approach for clubroot management. However, current resistant canola cultivars, available in Canada since 2009, were based on a single clubroot resistance (CR) gene.
Surveillance monitoring has shown that blackleg is again increasing in incidence and severity in western Canada, in part due to breakdown of a widely used major resistance gene. Sclerotinia stem rot is also a serious disease for canola growers, particularly in severe wet and cool growing seasons.
Researchers initiated a four-year project in 2014 to develop a set of differential lines of spring type Brassica napus with single genes for identification of races of Plasmodiophora brassicae and for durable resistance to clubroot.
Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan conducted a two-year project to further the discovery and subsequent genetic transformation for the introduction of apomixis technology into agriculture crops.
Clubroot, a serious threat to canola (Brassica napus) yields across Canada, is caused by the intracellular parasite Plasmodiophora brassicae.
