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Societal Impact Statement Plant breeding is crucial for improving agricultural crops for human use. However, an urgent rethink is needed to ensure the next generation of plant breeders have the necessary breadth of skills to provide ever more efficient, nutritious, profitable, and environmentally sustainable crops. Plant breeding is a multifaceted endeavor, which intersects with many other disciplines and professions. To help ensure that future plant breeding efforts are sustainable and relevant to the needs of society, it is vital that the interdisciplinary nature of the plant breeding profession is adequately reflected in student training and development. Summary Breeders need to have many faces to understand not only genetics but also environmental, social, and economic factors that are relevant for maintaining or improving crops for human use. In the United States, there is a long history of public involvement in agriculture and plant breeding. However, recent changes in the social systems underpinning public agriculture (i.e., funding structure) necessitate a rethinking of how agriculture education, specifically plant breeding education, should be facilitated. To provide viable plant breeding programs, it is necessary to explicitly acknowledge that breeding has been an interdisciplinary, long‐standing public endeavor to increase food system stability. Acknowledging this complexity has important pedagogical implications: the core of plant breeding resides in genetics, but the changing nature of this profession requires breeders to embrace a much broader training. Here, we suggest specific curricular objectives for plant breeders.

Societal Impact Statement : Plant breeding is crucial for improving agricultural crops for human use. However, an urgent rethink is needed to ensure the next generation of plant breeders have the necessary breadth of skills to provide ever more efficient, nutritious, profitable, and environmentally sustainable crops. Plant breeding is a multifaceted endeavor, which intersects with many other disciplines and professions. To help ensure that future plant breeding efforts are sustainable and relevant to the needs of society, it is vital that the interdisciplinary nature of the plant breeding profession is adequately reflected in student training and development. Summary Breeders need to have many faces to understand not only genetics but also environmental, social, and economic factors that are relevant for maintaining or improving crops for human use. In the United States, there is a long history of public involvement in agriculture and plant breeding. However, recent changes in the social systems underpinning public agriculture (i.e., funding structure) necessitate a rethinking of how agriculture education, specifically plant breeding education, should be facilitated. To provide viable plant breeding programs, it is necessary to explicitly acknowledge that breeding has been an interdisciplinary, long‐standing public endeavor to increase food system stability. Acknowledging this complexity has important pedagogical implications: the core of plant breeding resides in genetics, but the changing nature of this profession requires breeders to embrace a much broader training. Here, we suggest specific curricular objectives for plant breeders. Plant breeding is crucial for improving agricultural crops for human use. However, an urgent rethink is needed to ensure the next generation of plant breeders have the necessary breadth of skills to provide ever more efficient, nutritious, profitable, and environmentally sustainable crops. Plant breeding is a multifaceted endeavor, which intersects with many other disciplines and professions. To help ensure that future plant breeding efforts are sustainable and relevant to the needs of society, it is vital that the interdisciplinary nature of the plant breeding profession is adequately reflected in student training and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rice breeding programs in Hokkaido over the past 100 years have dramatically increased productivity and improved the eating quality of rice. Commercial varieties with high yield and good eating quality, such as Kirara 397, Hoshinoyume, and Nanatsuboshi, have been continuously registered since 1990. Furthermore, varieties with better eating quality using Wx1-1, which reduces amylose content to improve the taste of sticky rice, such as Oborozuki and Yumepirika, were registered in 2006 and 2008, respectively. However, to the best of our knowledge the genomic changes associated with these improvements have not been determined. Better understanding of the relationships between DNA sequences and agricultural traits could facilitate rice breeding programs in Hokkaido. Marker-assisted selection (MAS), which can select the plants with chromosomal regions tagged with DNA markers for desirable traits, is an advanced technology to manage genetic improvements. Here, we summarize the current states of MAS in rice breeding programs in Hokkaido before huge data sets of genome sequences using next-generation sequencing technology come into practical use in rice breeding programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The domestication of cultivated crops from their wild relatives narrowed down their genetic diversity in a bottleneck effect. Subsequently, the cultivation areas of crops have expanded all over the world into various environmental conditions from the original area along with human migration after domestication. Here, we demonstrated the genetic changes in the adaptation of rice to Hokkaido (41°2–45°3N latitude), Japan, from the tropics of their origin in Asian cultivated rice, Oryza sativa L. Although cultivated rice originated from the tropics, Hokkaido is one of the northern-limits of rice cultivation worldwide. Population genomics focusing on the local populations showed the varieties had genetically distinct classes with limited genetic diversity. In addition, some varieties in the class carried unique genotypes for flowering time, exhibiting extremely early flowering time. Certain mutations in unique genotypes can split off the varieties that are able to grow in Hokkaido. Furthermore, the changes in the genotype for flowering time during rice cultivation in Hokkaido demonstrated novel combinations of genes for flowering time owing to the intensive artificial selection on natural variation and rice breeding programs to achieve stable rice production in Hokkaido. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercial and scientific plant breeding programs require the phenotyping of large populations. Phenotyping is typically a manual task (costly, time-consuming and sometimes arbitrary). The use of computer vision techniques is a potential solution to some of these specific tasks. In the last years, Deep Learning, and in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown a number of advantages over traditional methods in the area. In this work we introduce a computer vision method that estimates the number of seeds into soybean pods, a difficult task that usually requires the intervention of human experts. To this end we developed a classic approach, based on tailored features extraction (FE) followed by a Support Vector Machines (SVM) classification model, and also the referred CNNs. We show how standard CNNs can be easily configured and how a simple method can be used to visualize the key features learned by the model in order to infer the correct class. We processed different seasons batches with both methods obtaining 50.4% (FE + SVM) and 86.2% (CNN) of accuracy in test, highlighting the particularly high increase in generalization capabilities of a deep learning approach over a classic machine vision approach in this task. Dataset and code are publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant breeding programs in local regions may generate genetic variations that are desirable to local populations and shape adaptability during the establishment of local populations. To elucidate genetic bases for this process, we proposed a new approach for identifying the genetic bases for the traits improved during rice breeding programs; association mapping focusing on a local population. In the present study, we performed association mapping focusing on a local rice population, consisting of 63 varieties, in Hokkaido, the northernmost region of Japan and one of the northern limits of rice cultivation worldwide. Six and seventeen QTLs were identified for heading date and low temperature germinability, respectively. Of these, 13 were novel QTLs in this population and 10 corresponded to the QTLs previously reported based on QTL mapping. The identification of QTLs for traits in local populations including elite varieties may lead to a better understanding of the genetic bases of elite traits. This is of direct relevance for plant breeding programs in local regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oil quality in vegetable oils is a relative concept that depends on the end-use of the oil. Vegetable oils are intended for food applications (salads and cooking oils, margarines, shortenings, etc) and nonfood industrial applications (biodiesel, lubricants, surfactants, etc). Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) oil has been traditionally appreciated in the world oil market. However, new emerging markets are demanding changes in oil quality for both food and nonfood applications. Nutritional and functional properties determining oil quality are primarily determined by the fatty acid composition of oil and the total content and composition of natural antioxidants, especially tocopherols. During the last 30 years these components have been extensively modified in sunflower through conventional selection from naturally occurring variation and trough mutagenesis. As a result, together with the standard sunflower oil whose fatty acid profile is made up of 11% saturated fatty acids, 20% oleic acid, and 69% linoleic acid, there is currently available a vast diversity of other sunflower oil types, for example low saturated (<7%), high palmitic (>25%), high stearic (>25%), high oleic (>85%), high linoleic (>75%) as well as a number of oils with intermediate levels and combinations among them. Similarly, the standard sunflower oil with 95% of the tocopherols in the alpha-tocopherol form has been modified to produce oils with high levels of beta-tocopherol (>75%), gamma-tocopherol (>95%), and delta-tocopherol (>65%). The novel fatty acid and tocopherol traits are in all cases governed by a reduced number of genes, which facilitates considerably their management in plant breeding programs aimed at developing cultivars with improved oil quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant breeding programs in local regions may have genetic and phenotypic variations that are desirable and shape adaptability during the establishment of local populations. Despite the characterization of genetic population structures in various kinds of populations, the effects of variations in phenotype on agro-economical traits currently remain unclear. In the present study, we evaluated phenotypic changes in 26 agro-economical traits among the local population during rice breeding programs in Hokkaido. Wide variations were observed in all 26 agro-economical traits with continuous distributions. In order to elucidate improvements in these agro-economic traits during rice breeding programs in Hokkaido, values were compared between genetic population structures. Traits were classified into four patterns based on the timing of significant differences. Patterns A and B showed significant differences once and twice, respectively. Pattern C gradually showed significant differences. Pattern D showed no significant differences for the desired directions. Based on the changes in phenotype observed in the present study and the genetic population structure for the local population in Hokkaido, a model of the artificial selection for phenotypes in genetic diversity among the local population during plant breeding programs has been proposed.