A £2.5m, three-year project has been launched to bring the first precision-bred oilseed rape onto commercial farms in Europe.
Light Leaf Spot Enhancing Resistance And reducing Susceptibility with EDiting (LLS-ERASED) is led by BOFIN farmers and is funded through the Farming Innovation Programme, delivered with Innovate UK.
It aims to bring together farmers, breeders, crop scientists and agronomists to tackle light leaf spot using precision breeding and new disease management tools.
Light leaf spot is the number one threat to UK crops, with yield losses estimated to have risen from £94m in 2017 to £300m in 2022. Control has become unreliable due to pathogen evolution and increased resistance to azole fungicides.
LLS-ERASED aims to deliver oilseed rape varieties with reduced susceptibility thanks to breeding techniques that accelerate the introduction of beneficial traits without introducing foreign DNA.
Crucially, it will be backed up by farmer-led trials on commercial farms with real-time disease forecasting and decision-support tools.
“This project is game-changing for farmers,” says project lead Tom Allen-Stevens.
“It will put precision-bred oilseed rape technology on to their farms for the first time across Europe. This is combined with risk forecasting and a new decision support tool that will bring growers effective disease control that is truly risk-based and data-driven. That is the reboot the industry needs, and that is what will help reverse the decline in the crop’s planted area.”
The project is based around a newly identified susceptibility gene, which the project hopes to ‘switch off’ using precision breeding. Researchers claim that this will reduce the ability of the light leaf spot pathogen to infect the crop.
The science is being led by John Innes Centre and the University of Hertfordshire, working alongside ADAS and Scottish Agronomy to integrate the new trait into practical, farm-ready disease-management strategies.
A consortium of leading UK and European oilseed rape breeders is involved in developing the disease-forecasting and testing material in elite commercial backgrounds. UK Agri-Tech Centre is overseeing project delivery and integration, supporting effective collaboration across partners and ensuring outputs remain focused on adoption, scalability and real-world impact.
“I am really excited to move our resistant material from the laboratory to field scale trials to see how it performs in a real-world setting,” says LLS-ERASED technical lead Dr Rachel Wells of John Innes Centre.
“Precision Breeding offers us an excellent opportunity to develop material to combat our pests and pathogens while supporting sustainable farming. Developing a trusted pipeline to streamline the process from research to variety release will be invaluable for crop improvement. Bringing this work together in an integrated pest management package looking at multiple, combined solutions, is the future of crop protection.”