This Centre’s loftiest goals transcend any particular trait, technique or species group. From the outset we have been aiming to develop general approaches and discover general principles in analysis, inference and prediction. But at the same time our collective feet are grounded in an eclectic mix of specific study systems, analytical approaches and practical challenges. This “creative tension” is also played out at the individual level, where some are comfortable in the rarified atmosphere of conceptual space while others are heavily invested in a specific crop, trait, technique or natural system.
Some of the various diverse corners of Centre activity, including work in my group, feature legumes. Why? Fair question, as few of them are particularly tractable systems for fundamental research. But they are unquestionably important as crop species both globally and nationally, and they have the unique property of symbiotic nitrogen fixation. And of course, pea in particular has been central to breakthrough discoveries on branching control. As such, within the Centre it is providing a convenient system in which to explore and model the interaction of branching with other whole-plant physiological and developmental processes.
This activity is gathering pace in the second half of the Centre with a large experiment underway in the Hobart phytotron under the careful supervision of Edu Burillo. This work involves detailed phenotyping of branching, flowering, proliferative arrest and yield across several developmental stages in a range of isogenic flowering and branching mutants grown under factorial light quantity x light quality conditions. It aims to show how flowering control pathways direct the plant’s allocation of energy into branch outgrowth and distribution of yield on the plant, and feed into the modelling of these interactions for predictive purposes.
Another reason for mentioning legumes is that they recently had their moment in the (Brisbane spring) sun at the 11th International Conference on Legume Genetics and Genomics. More than a dozen Centre and Centre-adjacent folk attended and had the opportunity to present their work in talks and posters. This meeting was first held in 2001, just after the Arabidopsis genome was first released, and still nearly 10 years before the first legume genome release. At that point it was difficult to imagine ever having access to much larger genomes such as pea or lentil (around 4Gb), and faba bean at 13Gb seemed like a ridiculous fantasy.
Of course technology marches on, and most major crop legume genomes, even those big ones, are now sequenced. This year’s meeting showcased the massive progress that advances in genomics are now bringing to this crop group – dramatically accelerating gene discovery, providing the first insight into pangenomes and their wider interpretative power and supporting ever more sophisticated genomic prediction in breeding.
Some contrasting highlights included large-scale genomics and international GxE projects in faba bean (Stig Anderson) and lentil (Kirstin Bett), reports on local initiatives to refine approaches in predictive breeding (AgVic, QAAFI), and a trio of invited speakers from China (Zhixi Tian, Ertao Wang, Fanjiang Kong) who presented extremely impressive achievements in the soybean system. Their work nicely illustrated how genomic, mechanistic and trait-focused thinking each still have distinct and complementary merits in the quest for yield improvement.
At the other end of the spectrum, Shahal Abbo gave a fascinating account of bitter vetch, a crop abandoned by organized agriculture early in its domestication but still harbouring considerable potential as one of the most climate-resilient grain legume species. Our own Christine Beveridge provided her trademark concise update on branching control and its relevance, and we heard composed and effective presentations from Karen Velandia, Chantelle Beagley and Caitlin Dudley on their PhD work. And finally, for the train-spotting stamp-collecting types among us, some small intrigue with the news (at the same time momentous and utterly trivial) that all seven of the genes first defined in Mendel’s seminal work on pea have at last been identified, in a tour-de-force collaboration between big data and old-school genetics.
Apart from all the barely-controllable legume-related excitement, this meeting also gave me pause to reflect on how the ever-expanding capacity for data generation and processing is shaping the science we are able to do and the questions we can ask. The ability to acquire and wrangle larger and more diverse datasets is making many simple long-standing questions much easier to address, and allowing us to extract ever more subtle signals from all the noise. Being able to measure everything, everywhere all at once and develop models that are ever more widely integrative has the potential to make us more efficient and incisive, and provide much deeper insights.
But as we know it also has its challenges. It requires a whole new suite of concepts, and vocabulary, and computational skills. It also demands we expand our thinking, and our rhetoric, ever further, from simple interactions in single species to complex networks of quantitative influences across wide phylogenetic spans, in the search for new levels of “mechanistic” understanding, productivity and societal benefit. Some of us, perhaps those with younger and more flexible brains, are rising admirably to meet this challenge, while it leaves others of us wondering how much further we can stretch. But in any case, it is a challenge that can’t be wound back, and will continue to develop.
And then, even once we’ve finally worked out what allows plants to achieve success, and sent those successful plants off to colonize space, there will of course be further frontiers to keep exploring. I’ll be curious to see what these are and how that goes.
Jim Weller
Chief Investigator, University of Tasmania
