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Sunflowers in Birmingham, Ala.

Sunflowers in Birmingham, Ala.

I'm rounding out The Salt's impromptu Pest Resistance Week (which started with stories about weeds and corn rootworms) with a little-known tale that may scramble your mental categories.

You've heard about herbicide-resistant weeds (which farmers hate) and herbicide-resistant crops like Roundup Ready soybeans or corn (which farmers like). But here's a case the only one I know of in which a weed helped create a herbicide-resistant crop.

The story begins in 1996, in a soybean field in Kansas. The soybeans in this field were able to tolerate a class of weedkillers known as "ALS inhibitors." This line of soybeans had been created through "mutation breeding."

This technique involves exposing thousands of seeds to chemicals that cause genetic mutations. One of those mutations allowed the resulting soybean plant to withstand the herbicides. (Similar kinds of herbicide-tolerant wheat, rice, and other crops have been created using the same method.)

Among the soybeans in this Kansas field, however, a few weeds also survived after the farmers sprayed their herbicide. The weeds were native sunflowers, wild relatives of the sunflowers that farmers grow as a crop. (As I reported a few months ago, sunflowers are one of a very small handful of crops that originated in our part of the world.)

The farmer contacted Kassim Al-Khatib, who was then a weed expert at Kansas State University. Al-Khatib collected some of the surviving weeds from this field, did some tests on them, and confirmed that these sunflowers were indeed resistant to ALS inhibitor herbicides.

A few months later, through a chance encounter at a scientific meeting, word of this discovery reached Jerry Miller, a sunflower breeder at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Sunflower Research Unit in Fargo, N.D. "I couldn't believe it. I called Kassim right away," recalls Miller. He saw the possibility of a herbicide-tolerant commercial sunflower created through traditional breeding, avoiding controversies over genetic engineering.

Originally posted here:
How A Sunflower Gene Crossed The Line From Weed To Crop

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