Crop Genetics & Breeding

Why does this matter?

Microbiomes are composed of microbes including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Most environments have microbiomes, from the surface of plant roots to your keyboard or skin. The largest, most complex and most important microbiome in your own body is found in your large intestine (your gut). Your gut microbiome essentially functions as another organ by 1) teaching the immune system what organisms are beneficial or harmful, and 2) digesting parts of the food you eat and producing new metabolites that are beneficial for other parts of your body. 

The types of bacteria, fungi, and viruses found in a gut microbiome can vary a lot from one person to another. Some species are helpful, others are harmful, and in other cases, groups of bacteria can work together in positive or negative ways depending on the overall makeup of the microbial community in a particular person’s gut. Our bodies function best with diverse and healthy microbiomes abundant in beneficial species. Your gut microbiome feeds on fiber and other things in the food you eat that your body can’t digest on its own, including metabolites found in crops such as corn, wheat, beans, etc.  Different metabolites from different foods promote the growth of different sets of bacteria. NFHC’s technology and infrastructure allow our plant breeders and geneticists to measure how new crop varieties will change the microbiomes of different people and ultimately develop crop lines that promote the growth of beneficial gut microbes. The impact of this new trajectory for agriculture will be new approaches for preventing and treating diseases, new products (crop lines, food products, probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics), and ultimately a new sector of the economy. Furthermore, this idea and methodology can be applied globally, both to diseases and crops.  It can also be adapted to treat animals and livestock.  The microbiome is specific to an individual which puts us on the path to personalized nutrition. The science holds the potential for a future where we could stop or prevent a disease in genetically susceptible individuals by proactively incorporating a newly discovered crop line, food product, or synbiotic.

Beans

Beans were domesticated in the Americas more than 10,000 years ago. In many countries they are a critical staple food, providing a healthy source of protein in low meat diets. Beans also contain large amounts of complex fibers that can be an important source of food for human gut microbiomes.

Did you know? The different beans you see at the grocery store (“Navy”, “Pinto”, “Black”, ”Kidney”, and so on) are all the same species, and breeders can make crosses between them. 

The University of Nebraska’s bean breeding program is run by Prof. Carlos Urrea who works at the University of Nebraska’s Research Center in Scottsbluff, more than six hours from NFHC headquarters in Lincoln. There he develops new varieties of beans for Nebraska farmers. Nebraska is the #1 producer of Great Northern beans in the United States and the #2 producer of Pinto Beans.

One of the populations of beans that Prof. Urrea works with is called the Middle American Diversity Panel (MADP), a set of 308 types of beans developed by bean breeders working at Universities and private companies across the United States and Canada. NFHC scientists have been able to use the AIMs system to understand the unique impact of each different bean variety on the different bacteria that make up the human gut microbiome. Doing this can both help to identify the beans that do the most to promote health, and also to identify genes in the bean genome that control the differences in how the beans feed gut microbiomes.