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Bayer Strengthens Seed Business

Bayer Makes Progress in its Wheat and Oilseed Rape Business

 A number of recent business deals have seen Bayer CropScience further strengthen the future of its European seed business in wheat and oilseed rape.

The company has recently acquired access to wheat germplasm from leading Romanian agricultural institution NARDI, and achieved a significant milestone in joint genetics research into wheat with Evogene. It has also completed the purchase of the Raps GbR oilseed rape business.

NARDI’s wheat germplasm pool is renowned world-wide for its winter hardiness, high tolerance against drought, broad disease resistance and good milling and baking quality.

Hartmut van Lengerich, Head of Cereals and Fungicides at Bayer CropScience said: “Improving the productivity of wheat cropping will be critical to achieving global food security. Our customers have turned to us to find new ways to help them, we have listened and are building a world-class research platform for wheat genetics and breeding. Our agreement with NARDI is another key building block in this strategy. To speed up development of new varieties, we have already entered into collaborations with the best partners in wheat research and breeding, reaching from Australia to Israel, France and Ukraine to the United States – and now Romania.”

In the meantime, Bayer CropScience AG and Evogene Ltd. have reached a milestone in their joint five-year research collaboration in wheat. The project is focusing on improving wheat yield, drought tolerance, and efficiency of fertiliser use.

Using Evogene’s proprietary tools, more than 200,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms ('SNPs') across the wheat genome have been identified as part of the companies’ efforts to improve wheat through the application of advanced breeding techniques.

SNPs are single-nucleotide substitutions of one base in the genome and a powerful type of molecular marker for traits improvement. Identifying SNPs across the wheat genome is an essential step towards improving desired traits in wheat through advanced breeding. The wheat genome is both complex and very large – approximately five times the size of the human genome – which creates a major challenge for breeders in implementing advanced breeding techniques. The identification of a significant number of SNP markers improves the overall understanding of the wheat genome. It is expected to help in the delivering the improvements in wheat set for the project.

On the oilseed rape front, Bayer CropScience has successfully completed the acquisition of the oilseed rape business of the seed company Raps GbR. This includes both varieties that are already on the market and the company’s ongoing breeding programme. The acquisition significantly strengthens the European oilseed rape breeding activities of Bayer CropScience.

For a number of years now, Bayer has pursued its own breeding program for winter oilseed rape. In North America the company is a market leader in seed, plant traits and crop protection products for canola. The business is currently being expanded to other oilseed rape-growing areas, including Europe and countries in Southeast Asia. Bayer CropScience aims to launch its first oilseed rape varieties onto the European market in 2012 – initially in the Czech Republic and then progressively in other European countries.