Dr Kioumars Ghamkhar | February 17, 2021 from GlobalHQ on Vimeo.
The MFGC, New Zealand’s only internationally-recognised and registered gene-bank by the FAO and the International Crop Diversity Trust, located on AgResearch’s Palmerston North campus may be the least recognised library in the country, but one that contains some of this country’s most valued intellectual property.
Director Kioumars Ghamkhar says the centre is by far the largest repository in the world for forage seed germplasm, containing over 2200 species, including 2500 wild variations of white clover alone.
In total, the collection has more than 150,000 seed samples stored at its cold storage facilities and 30% humidity to prolong their viability for 20-50 years.
The fact NZ only uses four or five grass species to underpin its multi-billion pastoral economy has Ghamkhar convinced there may be many more opportunities lying undiscovered within the centre, and the urgency for discovering them is only growing.
As NZ’s climate changes and events like drought become more frequent and severe, Ghamkhar admits feeling somewhat like a gold prospector who knows where the gold is, but just cannot quite reach it.
Funding limitations and a lack of international cohesion and communication between other germplasm centres in sharing information on their species genotypes, features, and growth characteristics have contributed to an inertia in responding to climate change with new ‘old’ crop varieties.
“It is the variations of these crops that may well hold the potential to deal with the challenges,” Ghamkhar said.
Globally there are over 1700 national and international plant gene-banks housing seven million germplasm samples.
However, despite there being more than 300,000 species of flowering plants on the planet, only 120 are cultivated and nine account for 75% of global plant-derived energy intake and of these, only three – wheat, rice and maize – account for more than 50%.
Ghamkhar is also an active member of DivSeek International Network, a group of plant scientists from 37 institutions around the world calling for greater crop biodiversity as a means to contend with climate change, pestilence and disease outbreak.
NZ’s vulnerability to monoculture disease has already been exposed with the Pseudomonas syringae pv. Actinidiae (Psa) outbreak in 2010 that wiped out the high-value Hort16a kiwifruit variety.
“Perennial ryegrass is our main crop in NZ. But the fact is our ryegrass has a very narrow genetic pool, and almost all NZ’s ryegrass comes from that pool. If ryegrass was hit by a Psa-type infection, the genetic diversity is not there to help counter that,” he said.
“We are talking about looking at the wild variations on our main crops, rather than just developing new tools for coping with things like climate change. To some extent this has been started with rice, but there is potential to apply it much further.”
Looking closer to home, he says problems growing white clovers on drought-prone East Coast hill country may be addressed by exploring the genotype of one of the more than 3000 wild variants held at MFGC.
Alternatively, with better international coordination that DivSeek aims to build between seed centres, scientists may save themselves reinventing the wheel when exploring germplasm, instead accessing work already done by overseas peers or work together and collaboratively instead of sparse efforts.
“Take Kikuyu grass for example. It is a good growing crop, but we have a weedy version from Queensland, and the grass originated from Kenya. Ideally, we would want to bring in the germplasm from Kenya to trial. With better connectivity between our centre and Kenya we could work more closely, and even trial it in a suitable environment there before bringing it here,” he said.
Ghamkhar admits he sees this as an emergency when farmers are called on to reduce stocking rates by up to 15% under the commission’s recommendations, but he is concerned that more consideration needs to go on lower-methane feed options.
“There are 200 collected wild populations of the forage species biserrula from the Mediterranean region and north east Africa held in the Australian gene-bank. Biserrula is a mono-specific legume, with no chance of cross pollination and a relatively safe import to try, and is ideal for warm, dry areas like the East Coast, with recorded low methane potential and very deep roots and nitrogen fixing ability,” he said.
He is hopeful DivSeek may ultimately work to develop a digital platform for gene-banks and scientists to access and record their research on germplasm and make it available to all.
“The technology is certainly there to do it, it is just a case of funding,” he said.
He says he is unsure why some of the lines from neglected species such as subterranean clover held at MFGC never made it over the commercial line during the halcyon days of NZ’s pastoral breeding programmes in the 1970s and 80s.
“It may have been some political influence, or perhaps there was no sense of urgency to try different species,” he said.
“Today, we face desperate times and these times need desperate measures, but farmers deserve the tools and materials to help them manage and survive the changes we are already seeing in the climate and the Government and society’s expectations.”
