GrainsWest Fall 2018

GrainsWest: How did you get involved in wheat breeding? Curtis Pozniak: I grew up on a family farm in Rama, SK, so I’ve always been interested in agriculture and plants. I enrolled in an undergraduate degree at the University of Saskatchewan and dur- ing the summer months I had the opportunity to work with really good companies and breeding programs. That really spurred my interest in plant breeding. It was in the later part of my undergraduate training that I met professor Pierre Hucl from the Crop Development Centre (CDC) and he had a graduate student position open. I was fortunate to work with him and do a PhD in plant breeding. During my stud- ies, I had the opportunity to work in the durum program at the CDC. It was perfect having a graduate position and good mentors to push me into plant breeding. GW: Would you say agriculture and plant breeding are your first true loves? CP: You bet—particularly the plant breeding aspect of my job. Our group at the CDC also has a strong research program look- ing at genetics of wheat, but I love the summer when we’re out in the fields making selections and looking at the vast genetic diversity available to us as breeders. Trying to harness that diversity into a commercial variety that will benefit our farmers is really exciting . GW: You and others have noted genomic research in wheat lags behind that of other crops. Have advances in technology helped wheat catch up? CP: I like to think 2018 was the year of the wheat genome. Look- ing back, the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consorti- um started sequencing wheat in a time when the technology was much more complicated than it is now. Sequencing technology and computational biology—using computer algorithms to pull together that data in a meaningful way—really advanced during that time. GW: What do the advances in computational biology— using biological data to create algorithms—mean for wheat breeding? CP: The wheat genome is about 16 billion base pairs—it’s five times larger than the human genome, which creates some com- plexities for data analysis. As well, the wheat genome is polyploid, which means it has three duplicated genomes that look very similar to one another. When you’re assembling the complete Fall 2018 grainswest.com 17 INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN FOR HIS WORK , CURTIS POZNIAK IS A WHEAT BREEDER AND PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN CROP DEVELOPMENT CENTRE. HIS BUSY SCHEDULE INCORPORATES FIELD PLOT WORK, TOURS, MULTIPLE GLOBAL RESEARCH PROJECTS AS WELL AS SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS. POZNIAK RECENTLY TOOK TIME OUT FROM HIS WORK TO TALK WITH GRAINSWEST ABOUT THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC ADVANCEMENTS IN VARIETY CREATION. BY ELLEN COTTEE • PHOTOS BY ELECTRIC UMBRELLA PHOTOGRAPHY Wheat breeder Curtis Pozniak demystifies advances in breeding technology PLANT SCIENCE SIMPLIFIED