Abstract
In this age of rapidly developing online learning, the advent of a series of talks and supplementary material devoted to genetics in agriculture from Henry Stewart Talks (http://hstalks.com/main/browse_talks.php?r=776&c=252) is welcome indeed. The series is designed for researchers and graduate students in the fields of genetics, plant science, animal science, agricultural science, food science, human nutrition and environmental science, advanced undergraduate students, policy makers and managers in public and private sectors, and continuing professional education/development.
Under the title Agricultural Genetics: Understanding and improving plants and animals for food and agriculture, the program comprises 16 sections, as follows:
A. The importance of genetics in agriculture
1. Agricultural genetics for food security (33 mins)
Prof. Robert Henry – University of Queensland, Australia
Current and projected demand for food; Role of genetic and non-genetic technologies; Application of genomics strategies
2. The role of genetics in adaptation of agriculture to climate change (49 mins)
Prof. Roberto Tuberosa – University of Bologna, Italy
Strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on crops – Phenotyping and genotyping for climate resilient crops – Genomics approaches and strategies – Chasing QTLs for drought resistance in wheat and maize – Genomics-assisted breeding for enhancing resistance to abiotic stress – Perspectives and future challenges
3. Social aspects associated with genetic engineering in agriculture (42 mins)
Prof. Ania Wieczorek – University of Hawaii, USA
Food safety of genetically engineered (GE) crops for human and animal consumption; Environmental safety of GE crops the environment; Regulation of GE crops; The need for GE technology; Ethical and moral issues of using GE; Foods created through GE (natural or not?); Coexistence/ food labeling; GE crops in developing countries
B. Plant genetics
4. Plant domestication (32 mins)
Dr. Duncan Vaughan – Formerly National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, Japan
Domestication, cultivation, evolution and co-evolution; Centers of crop origin and centers of crop diversity; Wild plant characteristics verses domesticated plant characteristics; The domestication syndrome, bottle neck of domestication, selective sweeps; Mutation, polyploidy, translocation, duplication and retro-transposons; Ex-situ, In-situ and On-farm conservation
5. Genetics of abiotic stress tolerance (50 mins)
Prof. Mark Tester – King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
Food security; Salinity; Salt tolerance; Ion transport; Osmotic tolerance; Plant phenomics; Yield
6. Biotic stress tolerance and resistance (38 mins)
Prof. Robert Park – University of Sydney, Australia
Genetic resistance provide the backbone of integrated management. Durable resistance by combining multiple resistance genes and genetic diversity to insure against pathogen changes. Gene for gene hypothesis facilitates this by simplifying the processes of identifying new resistance genes and monitoring pathogen virulence for deployed resistance genes
7. One plus one is better than two: genome doubling in flowering plants (36 mins)
Prof. Doug Soltis – University of Florida, USA
Polyploidy: traditional views and new paradigm; Success of the tetraploids: size matters; Ancient polyploidy and "hexaploidy;" Autopolyploids vs. allopolyploids; Origins of polyploid species; Polyploids as evolutionarily dynamic; Predictable and repeated evolution; Defining homeologs and homeolog loss; Tissue-specific expression of homeologs; Aneuploidy and its compensation
C. Animal genetics
8. Animal domestication (47 mins)
Dr. Carlos A. Driscoll – Wildlife Institute of India, India
There are commonalities among domestic mammals that hint at common metabolic and genetic pathways; Domestication is genetic, heritable and selectable; Genes behind domestication are related to personality in humans
9. Genetics of animal health (52 mins)
Dr. Donagh Berry – Teagasc, Republic of Ireland
Importance of genetic of animal health; Heritability; Phenotype as a function of genetics and environment; Genetic gain; Health traits; Viral diseases; Udder traits: genetic variation across species; Lameness (cattle and sheep); Bacterial diseases; Fertility traits (dairy cows); Metabolic diseases; Parasites; Genetic trends; Somatic cell score; Mastitis and other diseases; Genetic correlations between traits; Increase accuracy of selection; Predictor traits; Indirect selection; New technologies (genomics and others); Genome wide association studies and enabled selection
10. Animal behavioral genetics (22 mins)
Prof. Temple Grandin – Colorado State University, USA
Nature vs. nurture behaviors – Epigenetics; Innate vs. learned behaviors; Emotional drivers in the brain; The seek/fear switch; Emotional traits have a heritable component; New things are scary and attractive; Different types of fear; Measuring temperament in animals; Animal welfare and genetics; Biological systems overload; An animal is like a country; Future research; Don't let bad become normal!
D. Genetic technologies and processes in agriculture
11. Marker assisted selection in agriculture (77 mins)
Prof. Andrew H. Paterson – University of Georgia, USA
Measuring traits and genetic markers directly; Evolution of genetic markers; Discrete traits resulting from single genes; Marker searches using pooling strategies; Small influences of environment vs. dealing with complex traits; Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping; Association genetics complements QTL mapping; Conventional 3-generation linkage mapping; False positive (relatedness) vs. Significant association; Massively parallel sequencing; Cycling of gametes in vitro
12. Heterosis in agriculture (53 mins)
Dr. Nathan M. Springer – University of Minnesota, USA
Heterosis–Hybrid vigor of heterozygous off-spring relative to parents; Dominance and over-dominance theories of heterosis; Lessons from heterosis phenotypes; Genomic variation and heterosis; Practical implications of heterosis; Breeding and seed production practices
13. Mutation breeding in agriculture (48 mins)
Dr. Bradley J. Till – Plant Breeding and Genetics Laboratory, International Atomic Energy Agency, Austria
Mutation breeding in agriculture; Background on plant mutation breeding; Key principles and examples of mutation breeding; Reverse genetics for functional genomic and breeding; Considerations for vegetatively propagated crops; New technologies for mutation assisted breeding
14. Transgenics in agriculture (37 mins)
Dr. Wendy Harwood – John Innes Centre, Norwich UK
The history of genetic modification in agriculture–The technologies used for production of transgenic crops–GM crops worldwide and in the EU–The next generation of GM crops–The latest plant breeding technologies compared to ‘traditional GM’ technologies.
15. Epigenetics in agriculture (39 mins)
Prof. Graham King – Southern Cross University, Australia
Climate change: a global challenge for agriculture; Crop plasticity and genotype x environment interactions; Molecular basis of epigenetics; Mapping epigenetic marks and epi-alleles; Modulation of crop development and plasticity
16. The impact of DNA sequencing technology on agriculture (36 mins)
Dr. Stephanie Pearl – Scott Jackson Research Group, University of Georgia, USA
Breeding, genomics, and the world's most important crops–The most widely grown crops have been the focus of genome sequencing efforts–The use of genetics and genomics can accelerate the breeding process–The advent of next-generation sequencing has increased the feasibility of genomics-assisted breeding–The use and application of DNA sequencing data–The workflow of conducting a sequencing project–Applications of the data: experimental approaches for advancing breeding–The keys to successfully accelerating crop breeding is a combination of high-throughput genotyping, efficient phenotyping, improved statistical power, and efficient selection–Increasing our focus on underutilized crops can help improve food security
Each talk offers an index of the slides shown together with a facility for printing handouts of them.
In addition to the lectures themselves, subscribers will have access to a further 83-page document providing guidance for course administrators. This contains a summary of each lecture content accompanied by the speaker's biography. There follows more detailed information for tutors for each of the topics: suggestions are made for one or more tutorials, review articles and research papers are listed, and multiple choice questions offered together with examination questions and points for model answers to them. As we note below, the package is intended for institutional, not private, use, so the tutorial document is designed specifically for the use of course tutors; presumably it would not be offered to students.
Having watched some of the talk videos in full, dipped into others and read much of the tutorial document, this reviewer found himself impressed with both the quality of the material and the way in which the topics were presented. With more than 11 hours of video there is much too much material for detailed comment here. Nevertheless, taking an overview, this series is a convenient and helpful way of offering a grounding in genetics relevant to agriculture; colleagues intending to or, indeed, currently offering courses along these lines might find it very worthwhile to look in some detail at this package.
The series of presentations is offered on subscription to institutions at an all-inclusive price of $9,975 per annum for the whole of the Henry Stewart Talks Biomedical and Life Sciences Collection of more than 1,500 lectures collected into some 80 comprehensive series (but note that there is no charge for sub–Saharan African universities except for those in South Africa). The series may be browsed without purchase and portions of each video viewed but without sight of the supplementary material. If they so desire, it will be for the purchasing institutions to ensure that the course module description with its suggested exam questions and so on is available only to the teachers and not to the students, perhaps via a separate local password to the website. We understand that the publishers might be willing to entertain requests for stand-alone sales just of the agricultural generics course.