Designing New Lives in Rubber
By / Chu Mengqi / Updated: 01:19,21-August-2021
How many years are there in a person's life? They say the days of our lives have but threescore and ten. Seventy years is such a long time and it seems incredible to spend 30 of them engaged in one single thing. However, that’s what Wu Wenguan—an assistant researcher at the Rubber Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS)—is doing: spending 30 years waiting for some rubber trees to mature.
A millennial generation crop breeder, Wu Wenguan has always been passionate about scientific research. Winner of the Hainan Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award in 2019, Wu Wenguan and his team have been working to cultivate high yield rubber varietal with a strong degree of cold resistance. “In the past few years, there have been a number of occasions where a sudden cold snap has caused severe damage to Hainan’s rubber crop. Many trees even died. As natural rubber is an important strategic material, domestic production of it has to be both high and consistently stable,” said Wu Wenguan.
Plant seeds can be likened to computer chips which store all of the crop’s information. This includes details such as yield and the resistance to cold or disease. According to Wu Wenguan: "What we are trying to do is decipher the code written in the plant’s genetic information, which is the nature of the various gene sequences. Once we have figured out which genes meet our specific goals, we breed and cross breed the plants until they have the high quality genes we want them to have.”
Crossing cold-tolerant and high-yielding plants was just the beginning.
Breeding of rubber is a very long process. Rubber trees are not like rice or vegetables. They do not produce two or three crops a year. In fact, for just the first generation of hybrid trees, it will take Wu Wenguan and his team about ten years to complete systematic selection and breeding.
Furthermore, in order to make sure that parent plants’ excellent genes are transferred to the final offspring, the breeding team has to select the best combination from the first cross breeding to perform the second cross. It will be almost 20 years from their start date before they can begin production tests or try planting in places such as Guangdong and Yunnan.
In other words, with good luck, it will take the breeding team a minimum of 30 years to get the seeds they want ready for planting.
As we all know, double-lidded parents can still have a child with single eyelids. In the same way as this example, even if the parent plants are high-yielding and cold-resistant, that doesn’t mean the offspring will successfully have both traits.
Life is extremely complex. There are few fixed laws that are always followed. Instead, everything is full of uncertainty. These breeders will need to spend 30 years waiting for these hybrid seeds to be ready. They will spend every day observing and recording their work, but they won’t really know for sure what the final result will be.
However, as Wu Wenguan said, “This career is creative and meaningful and I will continue to love it. I believe that every life has value and I believe that as crop breeders we have the ability to tap into the unique potential of various plants as we explore the mysteries of life encoded by genetics.”
