(Quedlinburg) On July 29th and 30th, doctoral candidates, postdocs, students and guests from Australia and Germany followed the invitation of the JKI Institute for Resistance Research and Stress Tolerance to the JKI headquarters. Seventy participants took part in the first meeting of the International Research Training Group (IRTG) "Accelerating Crop Genetic Gain" (ACGG) in Quedlinburg.
Against the backdrop of changing environmental conditions, the central question of all sub-projects of the Research Training Group is: How can we accelerate breeding progress in field beans and sorghum? "Both crops have been cultivated on a small scale level so far and have been neglected in research due to the correspondingly low level of breeding activity," explains the hosting head of institute Andreas Stahl. "Sorghum still has a lot of potential as an alternative C4 crop. It is already widespread worldwide, including Australia, not least due to its comparatively good water use efficiency." At the same time, research on field beans is addressing several agricultural megatrends. For example, field bean not only uses nitrogen fixed from the air and thus partially replaces energy-intensive synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and expands narrow cereal crop rotations with a dicotyledonous crop, but also represents a domestic plant protein source.
Presentations, discussions, excursions - a diverse program for future breeding research
During the first IRTG workshop day, around 40 doctoral students from Down Under and Germany presented their topics in 3-minute talks. The following day, all participants visited the greenhouse and laboratories at the Julius Kühn Institute. One aim of the training program is to train and develop young scientists in the field of breeding research and to familiarize them with current research methods. Guest speaker Petra Jorasch from Euroseeds came the whole way from Brussels to give her lecture on "European regulatory frameworks for new breeding technologies and plant patents". In the "Meet the experts" section, the doctoral students had the opportunity to hold in-depth discussions in small groups, namely with Prof. Dr. Jacqueline Bately from the University of Western Australia in Perth; Dr. Susanne Dreißigacker, Head of the Molecular Breeding Laboratory at CIMMYT in Mexico; Dr. Greg Rebetzke, Chief Research Scientist at CSIRO (government-funded research institute in Australia) and Dr. Amine Abbadi, Head of Research and Development at Norddeutsche Pflanzenzüchtung Hohenlieth, all members of the Scientific Advisory Board.
Further excursions and practical insights into breeding research and plant breeding are planned until August 2nd at the Leibniz Institute IPK Gatersleben, the KWS Group, during a visit to the Department of Plant Breeding at Justus Liebig University Giessen and Hochschule Geisenheim University, which is also an associated partner of the Research Training Group alongside the JKI.
Background of IRTG:
The first IRTG workshop took place in 2024 from July, 29th to August, 02nd . The International Research Training Group has been initiated and is coordinated by the Justus Liebig University in Giessen (JLU) and the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia. Prof. Dr. Ian Godwin (UQ) and Prof. Dr. Rod Snowdon (JLU) are primarily responsible. The Julius Kühn Institute and Hochschule Geisenheim University are associated partners. On the German side, the training concept, which was launched in 2023, is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
