A Smarter Way To Grow

What if you could grow potatoes from seeds instead of tubers?

A research team led by Biochemistry Research Fellow Rowan Herridge, Associate Professor Lynette Brownfield and Professor Richard Macknight has developed a biotech innovation to help breeders create stronger crops and improve hard-to-breed species, supporting a more sustainable future for farming.

Rowan says the new technique uses targeted genetic modification to make breeding easier, faster and more reliable – by controlling plants’ natural tendency to reject their own pollen.

“Important agricultural species such as potato, ryegrass and brassicas like cauliflower display this self-incompatibility.”

This makes it harder for breeders to fix beneficial traits – such as disease or drought resistance – and pass them down to the next generation.

“To overcome this, we devised Combined Inbreeding and Outcrossing (CIAO), a method that allows plants to self-fertilise during breeding and then leverage their natural self-incompatibility to enforce breeding with other genetic variants to make valuable hybrids – a sort of best of both worlds.”

The potential impact goes beyond the lab. In crops like potatoes, for example, the technology could shift production from bulky tubers to lightweight seeds – reducing storage and transport demands and offering a more efficient way to grow food at scale.

CIAO could also be a valuable tool to help address environmental issues affecting farming and crop yield, like climate change and disease.

“By offering a flexible and efficient approach, CIAO allows breeders to more easily create varieties of plants that are higher yielding and more resilient in a rapidly changing environment,” Rowan says.

“We are also exploring possibilities with self-incompatible orphan crops – crops that have been grown historically, but not commercially – bringing such crops to commercially viable levels of productivity would be a huge achievement.”

With the support of Otago Innovation Limited (OIL), CIAO is currently being developed in collaboration with a multinational breeding company and is making its way through the patent process.

Commercialisation Manager Graham Strong says there is potential to further amplify the reach and impact of CIAO.

“We are open to partnerships that extend CIAO’s applicability in the field, exploring the possibilities of creating stronger, more viable hybrid plant varieties that can deliver tangible benefits for agriculture, industry, and food production worldwide.”