CGIAR System Organization - Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers

08/27/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 08/27/2024 19:15

HarvestPlus and ICRISAT to support CGIAR biofortification strategy through elemental analysis

CGIAR Breeding Resources Initiative has establisheda partnership with HarvestPlusand ICRISAT to complement the elemental analysis services available as shared resources for CGIAR anditspartners.

Globally, one in four children suffers from physical and cognitive stunting due to poor nutrition and over 2 billion peopleare affected by micronutrient deficiencies.

In poor, rural and vulnerable populations - where most of the staple foods are produced and consumed right away - a key intervention to address micronutrient malnutrition is biofortification. This approach is central to CGIAR's crop breeding strategy.

Biofortification involves enhancing the nutritional value of food cropsby increasing their vitamin and mineral density through conventional plant breeding, agronomic practices or biotechnology. It is a sustainable, cost-effective, and culturally acceptable solution to combat malnutrition.

CGIAR's 2030 strategy aims to alleviate micronutrient deficiencies in 500 million people, with 50% of them being women. The focus is on essential micronutrients such as iron, zinc, iodine, vitamin A, folate, and vitamin B12.

HarvestPlus'goal is that at least one billion people will be eating nutritious biofortified foods in the next decade. Recently, CGIAR, ICRISAT, and HarvestPlus partnered to advance this mission by providing elemental analysis through CGIAR Breeding Resources Initiativeglobal shared services.

Supporting CGIAR in breeding biofortified varieties

Biofortified varieties are bred from the highest-yielding crops, making them highly attractive to farmers. These varieties are also climate-smart, with many possessing drought and heat-resistant traits.

To develop the most micronutrient-enriched crops, breeders must accurately measure the nutrient content in the crops they work on. This is where analytical services play a crucial role.

Until recently, each CGIAR Center conducted its own elemental analyses, often on a small scale, leading to high costs and longer turnaround times. Smaller breeding programs, particularly those within National Agricultural and Research Extension Systems (NARES), may lack the expertise or sufficient demand for phenotyping to make these tests cost-effective and beneficial for the development and commercialization of products.

Breeding Resource Initiative(BRI) addresses this challenge by aggregating demand from multiple breeding programs. This allows the Initiative to negotiate competitive phenotyping costs with standardized lab vendors, offering streamlined services along with application-oriented training and advice.

Through the new partnership between HarvestPlus XRF Services and ICRISAT NIRS, Breeding Resources can now offer comprehensive elemental analyzes as shared services at the organizational level for CGIAR breeders and national partners. These enhanced services complement Breeding Resources' Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) service, providing cost-effective nutritional analysis for elements such as zinc (Zn), iron (Fe), aluminum (Al), chromium (Cr), and titanium (Ti).

"We wanted to make elemental analysis more comprehensive, accessible, affordable, and efficient," explains Rajaguru Bohar, Breeding Resources South Asia Lab Services Support Coordinator. "By integrating HarvestPlus XRF and ICRISAT NIRS under our shared services umbrella, we allow CGIAR breeders and national partners working on biofortification to submit samples for elemental analysis to through our Service Request Portal."

Eng Hwa, Head of Breeding Resources Services, emphasizes the importance of leveraging HarvestPlus and ICRISAT experience in biofortification. "This collaboration aims to capitalize on strategic advantages, particularly in the area of testing for nutritional traits, and to expand these efforts under the CGIAR umbrella so that more partners and crops can benefit,".

"We recently organized a workshop on the two new service types now available for elemental analysis," Bohar adds. "Participants acquired key competencies, such as sample preparation and best practices in elemental analyses to ensure the generation of quality data. We also assessed demand internally and among our national and private sector partners."

200,000 samples have been mapped for top micronutrient traits (Fe, Zn, Ca, protein, and PVA) in rice, wheat, maize, and millets. Additionally, 100,000 more samples are planned for other important crops such as pigeon pea, soybean, chickpea, and groundnut.

Further training sessions and a webinar launch are also scheduled to promote these services' availability.

Workshop on Elemental Analyses Services - South Asia
12-14 August 2024, Patancheru. Credit: ICRISAT/CGIAR.

NIRS and XRF: what are they?

Under the Breeding Resources-negotiated agreement, new NIRS and XRF services are available to CGIAR, as well as to public and private partners.

Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIR) services will be provided by the Facility for Exploratory Research on Nutrition (FERN) hosted at ICRISAT, facilitated via Breeding Resources' global shared services. NIRS is used to analyse organic compositional traits such as protein, fat, oil, and fatty acids. This method is rapid, cost-effective, non-destructive, and requires minimal sample preparation. It allows for simultaneous multi-component analysis, includes a double layer of quality control, and has robust, tested calibration-enabling large-scale analysis.

X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry is a non-destructive analytical technique used to determine the elemental composition of materials. XRF analysers identify the chemistry of a sample by measuring the fluorescent X-rays emitted when the sample is excited by a primary X-ray source. XRF offers low-cost, rapid phenotyping services and will be provided by HarvestPlus to potential users globally. HarvestPlus lab facilities, with locations in India, Rwanda, and Bangladesh, have the capacity to analyze over 40,000 samples per lab annually.

Breeding Resource Services (BRS) are not isolated efforts: they are supported by a dedicated process improvement team, Business Process Management(BPM). BPM meticulously documents each step-from service requests to data delivery-ensuring that the process is well-defined and standardized. The services are harmonized across various capacities, resulting in consistent and comparable data, which is crucial for cross-Center or cross-crop group analysis. Both ICRISAT NIRS and HarvestPlus XRF Labs are working toward achieving a quality management system with BPM's support.

All partners involved have agreed to conduct an inter-laboratory proficiency test for XRF and NIRS in 2025. Coordinated by HarvestPlus, this will further improve laboratory accuracy and efficiency across the region, supported by the collaboration with Breeding Resources.

Workshop on Elemental Analyses Services - South Asia
12-14 August 2024, Patancheru. Credit: ICRISAT/CGIAR.

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Written by Julie Puech, Accelerated Breeding and Breeding Resources Initiatives. Main image: ICRISAT and Indian partner breeders being trained on Elemental Analysis, August 2024, Patancheru. Credit: ICRISAT/CGIAR. Weexpress our gratitude to the CGIAR research funders for their invaluable contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund.