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“The breeders had said before that often the public sector just produced research and told them ‘this is what you want’, and this I decided was going to be different from that. They would be engaged from the very beginning in the whole programme.” - Professor Graham Moore, John Innes Centre.
A Pathway to Impact is at the heart of Professor Graham Moore’s wheat research programme, which aims to re-establish wheat pre-breeding in the UK. Pre-breeding is the process by which researchers create new experimental lines of wheat possessing valuable traits, such as increased yield or resistance to pests and diseases. Wheat breeding companies can then use these lines to create new elite wheat varieties carrying the desired traits which can be grown by farmers.
New varieties of wheat will help to ensure there is enough food as the global population continues to grow. Farmers will need to grow higher-yield varieties of wheat and other staple crops to meet our needs, as well as varieties that can resist common pests and diseases or that use nitrogen more efficiently, reducing farmers’ dependence on pesticides and fertiliser.However, the vital link between UK private sector wheat breeders and publically funded researchers was weakened in the 1980s, making it difficult for breeders to directly exploit fundamental science. “It was argued there was a breakdown in the pipeline going from fundamental science to exploiting this research,” says Professor Moore.
Professor Moore has devised a plan to repair this pipeline. He is coordinating a strategic Longer, Larger grant from BBSRC, which will become an Institute Strategic Programme in 2014, to develop new experimental crosses and provide breeders with the materials and data they need to generate new varieties. The programme is being coordinated from the John Innes Centre and involves three institutes and two universities. Professor Moore receives no funding from the programme himself. Instead, he sees his role as an honest broker working to bring together researchers and wheat breeders.
Before the programme had been developed, Professor Moore asked the wheat breeding companies and academics for their views on the key priorities. “We had a meeting of those academics and the breeders where we discussed the key target traits and what populations would be developed,” says Professor Moore.
This led to a grant proposal which was approved by BBSRC. Again, Professor Moore included the users at each stage of the grant process; “When we wrote the [grant application] the breeders saw what was written,” he says.
For the programme to be successful, the results of the academic research need to be passed to the relevant breeding companies, so the Pathway to Impact accompanying the grant sets out how the breeders will be engaged throughout the programme. For instance, the programme steering committee includes both representatives from the breeders and the academics responsible for each of the programme’s objectives. “We have a formal meeting with the breeders every six months where all the breeders turn up... all the academics give a presentation. There’s a six-monthly report which is updated, which everyone can see,” says Professor Moore.
“Out of that, at the last meeting, the breeders said they would organise their own meeting and as part of that they’ll invite people to discuss how they take some of the populations from us already.... so they can make better use of the data we’re generating,” he adds.
With such a complex programme, it was important that Professor Moore was able to coordinate the activities of all of the different researchers and the breeders; “In this case, as someone develops something it is then used by someone else. Each component is dependent on the others and therefore cooperation is key,” Professor Moore explains. At BBSRC’s suggestion, Professor Moore appointed a project manager to make certain the different groups and companies were talking to one another. “Having a project manager as been a huge advantage to me, in making sure we have the six month reports, and we have a three-month video conference where we discuss problems that have arisen.”
Professor Moore also used his Pathway to Impact to help identify others, such as INRA in France, who might have an interest in the research. Once the programme began, Professor Moore and his colleagues met with INRA and discovered that their wheat research complemented INRA’s programme.
By involving breeders at an early stage of programme development, Professor Moore helped ensure the outputs would be relevant to them. “The breeders had said before that often the public sector just produced research and told them ‘this is what you want’, and this I decided was going to be different from that. They would be engaged from the very beginning in the whole programme.” “Getting it right has taken quite a long time, but actually it’s worth going through several iterations,” says Professor Moore, “In doing that, it’s helped the programme.”
Institution:John Innes Centre
Funding council:BBSRC
Links
Staff biography
WheatISP website