Commercial Breeding
CROSSING
How it all starts.
Every year, we cross our elite lines to create unique offspring with great potential to solve challenges in agriculture and increase yield.
From our initial selections thirty years ago, we have built our germplasm from the ground up. Today, we have one of the world’s most comprehensive and competitive collections. This elite germplasm is the solid foundation of our breeding program.
SELECTION
Narrowing down to the best.
Our crosses between elite lines yield thousands of new and unique genetic lines. From these, we only pick out the best.
Scale is the key
Our mini-plot grid design allows us to test nearly 1,000 advanced breeding families in the Netherlands and France. We are using Drones and other high-throughput phenotyping technologies to evaluate complex traits faster than ever before.
Breaking the performance ceiling
We are obsessed with quinoa’s yield performance and stability. Our breeding populations have incredible potential to improve on grain yield, harvest index, time to maturity, tolerance to environmental stress, and resistance to downy mildew and pests. They also show superior grain quality traits for seed size, seed color and protein content.
Yield
Thousand Seed Weight
Days to Maturity
Whiteness
In the charts above, you can observe the broad genetic variation available in our current breeding populations for key traits. Dutchess –one of the best performers in the market for agronomic traits– is our benchmark for comparison. As you can see, there’s incredible potential for improvement!
The image above compares the seed size of our biggest and whitetest experimental lines relative to Dutchess, our benchmark. Per line, we analyzed the percentage of area covered by fifty seeds in a 2.5 x 2.5 cm box. The results show that the experimental line 0232 is 39% bigger than Dutchess in seed size.
ADVANCED TRIALS
The rigorous testing begins.
Breeding lines that have made it past our tough selection process undergo rigorous testing in our Advanced Line Trials. In these trials we compare our most promising breeding lines with proven leaders and competitors. Only the winners will make it to farmers’ fields.
Our Advanced Line Trials are carried out across multiple environments worldwide. Modern technologies give us precise measurements of how our breeding lines respond to each environment. Contact us to join this global initiative.
High-throughput Phenotyping
By using Computer Vision technologies on remote sensing and earth observation data, we can monitor the development of a plant through time. This allows us to evaluate our lines in different breeding stations worldwide, and follow up on our commercial fields' performance.
Where are we heading in 2022?
Progress in our genetics is substantial and tangible. Exciting new varieties are coming your way. Discover the 2022 prospects below.
The table above compares two of our strongest competitors to our 2022 prospects and our benchmark Dutchess.
* Comprehensive performance data (including yield) for the latest advanced lines will be released shortly.
The image above compares two of our strongest competitors to our 2022 prospects and our benchmark Dutchess in terms of seed size. Impressively, J6 is almost the double in size compared with Competitor 1.
Research & Development
HYBRID BREEDING
The future is hybrid
A hybrid variety is the uniform progeny that results from crossing two genetically distinct, yet homozygous inbred parents. Hybrids are significantly more productive and resilient than their parental lines. This phenomenon -known as hybrid vigor- is yet to be unlocked in quinoa and Radicle Crops aims to do it first.
The key for a reliable and efficient hybrid seed production system is the creation and maintenance of "fully female" parental lines. To get there, we are exploiting cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS), a natural yet rare genetic trait that enables the development of breeding lines capable of producing pollen. In the images above, you can see a normal pollen producing plant (left panel) and a "fully female" plant (right panel) which does not produce pollen.
Engineering hybrid breeding
Producing "fully female" parental lines is lengthy and tricky. But we can simplify the process.
To efficiently activate and de-activate CMS in quinoa, we first need to understand which rare gene variants control this trait. In 2021, with the magic of genomics and bio-informatics, we have unveiled the first candidates!
TRAIT DISCOVERY
Future-proofing quinoa
Quinoa is an incredible resilient crop. We know it can succeed under drought and high salinity, and we are confident it can do much more. By using state-of-the-art phenotyping technologies, genomics and bioinformatics, we are quickly learning what makes quinoa so unique, and we are starting to use this knowledge to make even better varieties.
At Radicle Crops, we want to keep our stakeholders informed about the progress made in our genetics research and commercial breeding programs. We hope our 2021 Virtual Field Day has provided you the insights and confidence that we are going in the right direction. We also hope that despite its virtual format, you have attained a realistic vision of what a day is like for the breeders and scientists at Radicle Crops.
We look forward to bringing you more updates and exciting leads from our research stations all over the world.
See you soon!
