3P-Tec - Three-parent breeding technology for plants of the future

Background

There is an urgent need for an agricultural revolution to generate climate-resilient cultivars, which combine proven traits with novel qualities adapting crop plants to climate extremes, including heat and drought.

Novel breeding technologies can make the difference to enable farmers to achieve high yields with climate-robust crops to secure food supplies for the world's population.

Breakthrough Technology

In the framework of the ERC Consolidator Grant "bi-BLOCK," we discovered that plant egg cells can fuse with two sperm, producing offspring with three parents instead of two - one mother and two fathers - bypassing a hybridization barrier that is a major limitation for conventional plant breeding approaches.

The three-parent breeding technology (3P-Tec) literally opens the way for exploiting beneficial traits of previously incompatible climate-adapted wild species. In the framework of the ERC Proof of Concept grant "TriVolve," we teamed up with one of the world's leading plant breeding companies (KWS Saat SE & Co. KGaA) and successfully transferred the strategy to sugar beet as an experimental crop prototype.

Objectives

The objectives of this project include:

1. The development of the 3P-Tec technology for further crop plants, including potato.
2. The establishment of technologies that enhance the efficiency of obtaining three-parent plants.
3. The commercial exploitation of 3P-Tec.

The project capitalizes on the breeding know-how, worldwide networks, and commercialization expertise of the breeders Aardevo and KWS.

Impact

3P-Tec will revolutionize the ability of breeders to develop improved crops by providing a tool to mine beneficial gene variants of currently incompatible species and to substantially shorten the time to market of climate-adapted seed varieties.

It provides a novel breeding strategy with economic benefits expected to positively affect the social welfare of farmers as well as upstream and downstream industries related to the agricultural value chain.