Georgia researchers aim to engineer more resilient peanuts as new challenges threaten crop
Spectrum News
By Chris Welch
Ben Boyd’s farm in southeast Georgia has been in the family since 1909. “I've grown peanuts all my life, 30 years, maybe more than that,” Boyd said. “And I hope in 2029 and 2309, my family's still in the same place farming.” But for that to happen, he might need a new peanut — that is, a peanut with a different genetic makeup.
Peanuts are a $1 billion dollar industry in the U.S. thanks in large part to the household staple peanut butter. Nowhere is this crop more important than the state of Georgia, which produces half the nation’s peanuts. Changes in climate and emerging diseases are making the domestic peanut harder and harder to grow. But researchers at the University of Georgia are using DNA to create a more resilient variety.
That’s where botanist and geneticist David Bertioli and scientist Soraya Bertioli come in. They’re a husband and wife duo at the helm of the university’s Wild Peanut Lab. “The peanut is so important to the Americans,” Soraya Bertioli said. “You go to school and you take your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” She explained how new diseases and changing climates are creating more challenging conditions. “The main problem all over the world, it's called leaf spot,” she said.
Leaf spotting can be caused by fungus, bacteria or stress from the environment, and it can wipe out an entire crop. Using genetics, the Bertiolis and their team at the Wild Peanut Lab are crossing elements from the domestic peanut we know with genes from their less-edible wild ancestors to breed a more resistant variety. “We bring new alleles, new genes, new parts of the wild peanuts, part of their relatives, and make them more… give them plasticity,” Soraya Bertioli said. “They become more resilient. They become much more adaptable to different climates.”
She explained that the goal is to create a certain type of peanut that can grow better in drought-prone regions, for example, others that fare better with flooding as well as peanuts that are more resistant to all kinds of diseases. “This greenhouse has about 12 different species that we crossed with peanut,” Soraya Bertioli said. “So we have over 200 times more variability in this greenhouse than we have in any peanut crop anywhere in the world.” The researchers take the young plants to a lab and expose them to certain pathogens. In one such experiment, students are working with 1500 unique samples to try to find a type of peanut that’s resistant to a very specific type of fungus.
For Millicent Avosa, a Ph.D. student from Kenya, it's personal: that fungus once wiped out her entire family’s peanut crop in Kenya, a country in which agriculture is the backbone of the economy. “I grew up in a household where farming was paying for my school fees and I remember one time there was total loss,” Avosa said. “There was absolutely nothing, and it actually was a devastation.” This work could help farmers around the world, including her mother. “She calls me and she would ask me, ‘I'm having this problem, do you think you're working towards it?’” Avosa recounted. “And I'm like, ‘Yes, Mom, I'm working towards it.’” “It definitely will make a huge difference,” Avosa pledged. The work they're doing isn't being done at this scale anywhere else on Earth. “Somebody's got to be in that lab pushing just as hard as we are, trying to come up with a new variety that can withstand all these new pressures and all these things that we haven't even thought about yet,” Boyd said.
“We are always looking for the perfect peanut,” said David Bertioli. “But that will be a never-ending task.” That’s because the environmental and biological challenges are constantly evolving, making it a tough nut to crack. “It'll get better, but it's a race, you know, and there's no finish line,” Boyd said. “It's been that way since the beginning of time, and if you want to be a farmer and you're looking for a destination, you're in the wrong business,” he said.