The last thing University of Calgary PhD student Logan Skori's father, Ellie, and other canola farmers want to see when they harvest their crops are green seeds.
Late season, non-lethal frost prevents chlorophyll, a photosynthetic pigment in the seeds of the valuable oilseed crop, from naturally breaking down, or "degreening," and producing a high-quality yellow embryo at seed maturity.
Grade No. 1 canola cannot have more than two per cent of green seeds, but frost can substantially increase this percentage. When green seeds are processed to extract canola oil, the chlorophyll reduces the oil's storability and quality.
Farmers receive a lower price for frost-damaged green seed canola, which costs them an estimated $150 million annually.
Now, Skori and a team of Faculty of Science researchers led by Dr. Marcus Samuel, PhD, have developed a gene-based technology to produce canola plants that can withstand late-season frost and still produce high-quality seed.
"We've been able to create canola lines that can degreen properly," says Samuel, associate professor of integrative cell biology in the Department of Biological Sciences.
Alberta farmers grow 35 per cent of all Canadian canola, for both domestic and international markets that's worth $27 billion a year.
"If our research was integrated into canola-breeding programs, it would serve like crop insurance for the farmers, who ultimately take the financial burden for frost-damaged canola," Skori says.
Skori and Mendel Perkins, a member of Samuel's research group when the study was done (and is now doing his PhD at the University of British Columbia), are co-lead authors of the team's study. Their paper, "Genetic Manipulation of ABI3 Confers Frost-Tolerant Seed Degreening in Canola," is published in the peer-reviewed Plant Biotechnology Journal.
