I was initially introduced to Dr James Myers at the OSU Winter Cereal and Grains field day, where he gave me a quick tour of the early maturing mild habanero peppers he’d been working on. I later took Jim up on his offer to continue our conversation and to get a tour of the OSU Vegetable Research Farm. I had already visited the greenhouses and lab during my time in Portland, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see the breeding trials out in the field, and hear directly from Jim about his work.
Jim Myers is Professor of Vegetable Breeding & Genetics at Oregon State University. He has worked at OSU for almost 30 years, his aim to develop improved vegetable varieties adapted to the Pacific Northwest region, with a focus on flavour, nutrition and resistance to pathogens. Jim and his team develop crops both for processing and for fresh market, and he has a keen interest in breeding specifically for organic production. As Project Director, Jim has been an instrumental part of the NOVIC project – a national project to increase the number of vegetable varieties adapted to organic systems - and has released many exciting varieties during his career. He has also worked closely with the Culinary Breeding Network on many of his variety lines.
During my day with Jim, I got a tour of the research facility, including a behind the scenes look into the vast library of seed held by the department which forms the basis of many of their breeding projects. Over the years, Jim has worked on several long running projects, including pathogen resistance in beans, developing OP broccoli lines without cytoplasmic male sterility, and most famously the ‘Indigo’ line of high anthocyanin tomatoes, which originated from his programme.
I was keen to find out more about these infamous tomatoes. Jim and his graduate students were the first to create these high anthocyanin tomatoes using conventional breeding approaches. Tomato fruit typically do not have anthocyanins, but the varieties released through OSU have elevated levels of anthocyanin in the epidermis, resulting in completely purple-black skinned fruit that is very nutrient dense. The first release of this kind – Indigo Rose - has been available in the U.S since 2012 and is now moving into global markets. Subsequent releases have been Indigo Cherry Drops, Indigo Pear Drops, Indigo Kiwi and Midnight Roma. These tomatoes are fairly commonplace across most seed catalogues these days, but it’s incredible to think that nearly all tomatoes in this class originate from germplasm from Jim’s program.
I had seen some of the current breeding lines when I had visited the greenhouses back in May, and had been eager to ask Jim more about this project. With the recent widespread release of the Purple Tomato – a genetically modified food crop that uses the genes from Snap Dragons to achieve the intense purple colour to the flesh – and the somewhat controversial focus on GM being the answer to food security, I wanted to better understand if traditional plant breeding methods could compete with these technological developments and offer an alternative way forward.
Jim and his team have been working on achieving the purple trait in the flesh of the fruit by continuing to back cross genetics from wild tomatoes, and he was certain that ‘all traits can be modified through conventional breeding’ methods. ‘At one time I thought there were certain traits that could only be done through genetic engineering, but I think now that all traits could be modified through conventional breeding. Even things like Roundup resistance. The occurrence in weeds has convinced me that if you put things under enough selection pressure and with enough genetic variation, you’re going to find traits that will give you resistance to Roundup.
‘GM is aimed at traits for the company (selling the product), not the plants’ and he agreed that we do not yet fully understand the wider impact of these GM crops on plant health. He cited CRISPR, and the fact that it may become very difficult to identify varieties that had been created through this method. ‘CRISPR is a whole different ball game. With GMO we could still test for it and know when something has a transgene or not and so could be used in Organic (systems). CRISPR is going to be very different. When you get into something like CRISPR, you have an induced mutation system that is targeted…I think you may actually know more about what you’re changing in the plant, less chance of off target things happening, but you pretty much have to take it on a case-by-case basis.’
CRISPR is different to what we have, up until now, understood as genetic modification. CRISPR involves highly specified editing of an organism’s genome – often single gene edits – rather than introduction of new genetic material.
I am not a geneticist, but it feels like CRISPR is a simplification of something that is inherently complex. Turning a gene on or off, or removing it, occurs to me as breeding without knowing what all the underlying interactions of these genes are and the potential unknown consequences. Traditional plant breeding methods, on the other hand, feel like working more in reciprocity with plants. Particularly if these methods are carried out within organic systems using field-based trials where environmental variables are taken into consideration.
In our conversation, Jim also referenced the diversity that has occurred through his tomato breeding programme – there are now 50+ cultivars globally that are bred out of the original indigo genes released through OSU. There is only one Purple Tomato in the GM line. The colour might not yet run throughout the flesh of the fruit in these traditional varieties like in Purple Tomato, but Jim is working on it.
Whilst on the topic of diversity, I asked Jim what his thoughts were on its role in food security:
‘Diversity is essential for providing the buffer against all environmental biotic and a-biotic shocks that can happen to the system. It’s not only the diversity in terms of having all the different alleles that you need in a population, but also in the genotypes. In terms of allelic or genomic diversity we’re probably doing ok, we’re probably not losing much of that. But we’re losing a lot of the genotypic diversity, the unique gene combinations we have in varieties. When we get these seed company mergers, they’re taking two companies that have fairly extensive portfolios and putting them together and something has to give, they don’t want to be producing all those varieties, something gets lost. We’re also losing it through hybrids, because when a hybrid goes away, they’re not giving out the inbreds (parents).’
Looking through the shelves and shelves of germplasm in the OSU collection, it was comforting to know that there are these institutions still very much focusing on maintaining that diversity. The department breeds cultivars for conventional farming systems, and runs trials for companies such as Syngenta on a regular basis. But they also continue to focus on crop adaptation to organic systems. Jim hinted that funding in this area is always a challenge, but through partnering with organisations such as Culinary Breeding Network, the hope is this work will continue to gain momentum.
After a tour of the facility, Jim drove us out to the trial fields, where I got to see some more of his breeding work in action. One of these projects was an open pollinated population of Broccoli that Jim has been working on for the past 3 years. Jim had previously created a broccoli population utilising a crowd breeding method not unlike the project I have been leading on with a group of amazing farmers back home. Several OP varieties resulted from this project, and he was now focusing on a new population to capture what remains of commercial broccoli that hadn’t yet been converted to CMS.
‘Cytoplasmic male sterility (a condition under which plant is unable to produce functional pollen) is inherited maternally so any F1 hybrid out there is going to have that trait and it won’t be able to set seed. Most companies are using CMS…it gives them much better control in terms of breeding and for proprietary control.’
In this breeding work, Jim is focusing on plants that display heat tolerance, have adequate processing quality and taste good – he demonstrated the difference in colour of the plants as we walked the field, the darker stems indicating those all important anthocyanins and improved flavour & nutrition. And crucially, these are open pollinated and so farmers can save their own seed.
One crop I couldn’t not discuss with Jim were beans – probably one of the vegetables he has dedicated most of his career to. During my visit to the lab I saw the seedling straw tests inoculated with white mould – and these had now been planted out in the field and were growing away well. Jim had identified a need for resistance to this disease, which in agricultural crops under favourable weather conditions can cause 100% loss of yield. The plants I observed in the lab had been screened at a young age to assess resistance when infected with the pathogen. Those that survived had been planted in the field and were being observed for general vigour and to evaluate field resistance. These beans have up to 8 parents containing sources of genetic resistance to the disease from drying, snap and pole varieties.
I was also fortunate enough to get a demonstration of ‘popping beans’. Originating in South America, these ‘Nuna’ beans are commonly found in Peru and Bolivia, but are short day sensitive and grown at high altitude. Jim had been adapting the crop to the Pacific Northwest climate for years, and was ready to release a variety when he discovered that the material had been patented. This meant his breeding work was an infringement on a patent, and his project had to be shelved. Utility patents on plants are a fairly new form of intellectual property right that ‘protect new and unique’ characteristics. Patents on living organisms are highly controversial and arguably unethical, as many of the genes being patented exist naturally in the plant world and pose yet another threat to food and seed sovereignty.
But Jim waited…and he waited…and fortunately the companies holding the patents also shelved their work, and the patent was not renewed. This meant his breeding project could continue, and during our meeting he enthusiastically demonstrated the results of his patience and labour – beans that pop just like corn under high heat, either in oil in a pan or the microwave, and offer a protein rich alternative to popcorn! They were a delicious snack, something new to me and maybe a whole new market class. It was yet another example of how the innovative work being carried out by plant breeders such as Jim and his team at OSU can help to expand diversity in our diet, and ultimately increase food security.