Mark Samuels, geneticist at the University of Montreal
Climate change is disrupting agriculture around the world, and as weather patterns become increasingly unpredictable, farmers and policymakers are scrambling to ensure that people not only have enough to eat, but “they can get the most nutritious food available.”
A Canadian research team is looking for a way, based on centuries-old indigenous agricultural practices, to increase plant diversity beyond the traditional domestically grown crops of wheat, corn, canola and oats.
Led by Mark Samuels, a geneticist at the University of Montreal, the team of scientists succeeded in sequencing the genome of a wild plant called Chenopodium berlandieri, or Berlandier goosefoot, which is a northern cousin of Chenopodium quinoa, the southern American quinoa.
Today, health-conscious Canadians are consuming more and more quinoa. Quinoa has several advantages over other crops. In fact, it is richer in protein and essential amino acids (especially lysine, which is found in much lower amounts in wheat and corn) and its sugar content is lower.
However, there is a problem, at least from a Canadian perspective.
Commonly grown in South America, quinoa does not do well for cultivation in Canada, where the growing season is shorter and winters are long. Although quinoa is grown commercially in western Canada, its cultivation in eastern Canada has been less successful. Most of the quinoa consumed here is imported.
This prompts researchers to take an interest in quinoa’s northern cousin, Chenopodium berlandieri. This plant is commonly known as goosefoot in English because its leaves look like crow’s feet and its seeds have small cells on their surface. (Quinoa and Berlandier’s lamb quarters are just two members of the large Chenopodia family.) Berlandier’s lamb quarters were grown and eaten by indigenous peoples in North America before the arrival of European settlers. This commodity was analogous to South American quinoa. However, colonization put an end to its cultivation, while quinoa survived as a crop in the south of the continent. The two species remain similar enough to interbreed freely.
As a plant native to Canada, Berlandier’s lamb quarters could potentially be used to improve quinoa’s adaptation to Canada. “To help the plants adapt, they can be crossed with similar wild species, creating hybrid forms,” says Mark Samuels. However, the hybrids do not have the advantages of the parents, so these forms must be crossed and re-crossed over many generations, a period spanning years, decades and even centuries.
However, the use of new genomic tools – here sequencing to determine the precise genome of C. berlandieri – means that “in principle it is possible to increase the time required to ensure a better adaptation of a crop such as quinoa to a new one significantly reducing the environment, and that in itself could be a game changer,” says Mark Samuels, associate professor of medicine at UdeM.
He describes his team’s success with C. berlandieri in a study published in the journal Plants in January. His team members include Professors Sara Halwas and Anne Worley from the Departments of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at the University of Manitoba. Sara Halwas studied the agricultural practices of indigenous peoples prior to her contact with Europeans, notably doing an interdisciplinary PhD with Anne Worley on C. berlandieri. They provided the Manitoba C. berlandieri sample, which was sequenced.
In addition to facilitating the adaptation of quinoa to a crop more widespread in Canada, the project has the more ambitious goal of enabling a new domestication of C. berlandieri to be agriculturally viable for North American agriculture without the very long development times normally required.
Thanks to genomics, this plant, once part of traditional Aboriginal culture, could now be cultivated again to meet the urgent need to diversify the sources that Canadian people can turn to for food without sacrificing uneconomical ones way to have to import is actually an identical plant species.
“If Berlandier’s quarters of lamb are more or less forgotten, then thanks to genomics we could revive the cultivation of this native plant,” observes Mark Samuels, who is in touch with First Nations communities who have expressed an interest in his work.
This work, first presented last June at the annual meeting of the Botanical Association of Canada in Rouyn-Noranda, was carried out in collaboration with senior researchers from the Institute for Research in Plant Biology, affiliated with the University of Montreal Botanical Garden of Montreal .
To pay tribute to Étienne Léveillé-Bourret, his colleague at UdeM, for the advice he gave him in a field that was new to him, Mark Samuels dedicated most of his career to human genetics. It has a laboratory at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center, affiliated with the University of Montreal.
With this new study, the multifaceted researcher embarks on plant genomics.
“It’s a natural extension because nutrition is an important aspect of health and I’ve done a lot of research into cholesterol genomics, which has a nutritional component,” says Mark Samuels, who is of American and Canadian nationality and whose spouse is from a farming family in Newfoundland.
“I couldn’t have predicted that I would be so interested in quinoa, but I look forward to doing more,” he concludes.