The Crop Trust Biodiversity for Opportunities, Livelihoods and Development (BOLD) program aims to strengthen food and nutrition security by supporting the conservation and use of crop diversity. The BOLD alfalfa project used alfalfa crop wild relatives to improve diversity for climate change adaptation in breeding programs in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Zambia. The new diversity will assist in the development of new forage varieties that can expand livestock rearing and forage production opportunities for small holder farmers, improving their resilience to lower rainfall and higher temperature changes that are associated with climate change.

Pre-breeding lines derived from crop wild relative germplasm (Humphries et al 2020) have been developed and evaluated at each of the partner countries to increase diversity for local breeding programs. The project has targeted wild parents from drought and cold environments to use as parents in the pre-breeding lines, and has used donor parent from accessions acquired from the N.I.Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR, APG 85016–85023) that represent ecotypes described as drought tolerant by Sinskaya (1950). The project use parents selected from accessions acquired from the Kazakhstan Scientific Research Institute of Agriculture and Plant Growing (KSRIAPG), and introgressed M. sativa. subsp. caerulea and M. s. subsp. falcata collected from the western desert and northern regions of Kazakhstan. The cold tolerant cultivar “Zhongcao No. 3” (APG 84289), which is adapted to Inner Mongolia, was used as a parent to further increase the winter hardiness of some of the pre-breeding lines ( see APG 85030, APG 85031).

The project has also progressed the development of new hybrids between M. sativa, M. arborea, M. truncatula, and M. intertexta (Bingham 2009) by recombining this material over five generations, and selecting populations with high forage yield (APG 85024), large seeds (APG 85025) and yellow flowers (APG 85027). The pre-breeding lines developed in the BOLD alfalfa project have been included in the FAO Multilateral System (MLS) of access and benefit sharing and are available from the Australian Pastures Genebank. Special requests for higher seed numbers may be approved where seed is available and the evaluation targets developing countries and farmer participation in the evaluation.

References

Bingham E (2009) Medicago Genetic Reports, Volume 9, 2009 (Dedicated to Hybrids of Medicago sativa X M. arborea). Available at: http://www.medicago-reports.org/volumes09.php Humphries AW, Ovalle C, Hughes S, del Pozo A, Inostroza L, Barahona V, Yu L, Yerzhanova, S, Rowe T, Hill J, Meiirman G, Abayev S, Brummer EC, Peck DM, Toktarbekova S, Kalibayev B, Espinoza S, Ivelic‐Saez J, Bingham E, Small E and Kilian B (2020) Characterization, preliminary evaluation and pre‐breeding of diverse alfalfa crop wild relatives originating from drought‐stressed environments. Crop Science, doi:10.1002/csc2.20274 Sinskaya, E. N. (1950). Medic-Medicago L. em. Brief review of the genus. In E. N. Sinskaya (Ed.), Flora of cultivated plants of the U.S.S.R (Vol. 13, pp. 7–195). Translated from Russian in 1961 by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation.