Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Annual PBCC Meeting, Pine Mountain, GA, August 25, 2019

Goals for 2019/2020

All five current objectives were addressed at the annual PBCC meeting within the ongoing SCC80 project. Twenty state reps were in attendance, including one on Zoom, along with Ann Marie Thro (NIFA REP) and Eric Young (ADMIN ADV.). Paul Zankowski (Senior Advisor for Plant Health & Production and Plant Products, Office of the Chief Scientist), two NIFA National Program leaders, Lin Liang-Shiou and Ed Kaleikau, and NIFA Program Specialist Pushpa Kathir, also joined the meeting along with six other NAPB members.

Below are goals for each objective for the upcoming year:

Objective 1: Collect, analyze, and disseminate information about the U.S. plant breeding effort in both public and private sectors, to include human capacity and access to enabling knowledge, technologies, germplasm, and infrastructure [Lead Dr. Kate Evans]

• Publish results of public sector breeding survey
• Re-issue the survey every 5 years to align the survey with governmental 5-year plans to be in sync with government funding. The first re-issue would be sooner (3 years after the initial survey, 2021) to include all programs that have been registered after the initial deadline, and therefore will not be included in the report/publication.
• Collate private sector breeding data from published annual reports
• Develop private sector breeding survey

Objective 2: Promote the conservation, characterization, and utilization of plant genetic resources and access to those resources for plant breeding. [Lead Dr. Pat Byrne]

• Begin development of online courses and training modules on plant genetic resources, if a USDA-NIFA Higher Education Challenge Grant is funded.
• Develop a series of short instructional videos for genebank training using funding from USDA-NLGRP and PROCINORTE, a collaboration among the national germplasm systems of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
• Complete the development of two infographics on plant genetic resources conservation and use.

Objective 3: Identify Best Management Practices for public sector intellectual property protection to encourage the creation and distribution of improved crops for a broad range of needs and opportunities. [Lead Dr. Bill Tracy]

• Continue to provide outreach as opportunities arise

Objective 4: Optimize opportunities for public-private collaboration in plant breeding research and education, including continuing education for plant breeders. [Lead Dr. Thomas Lubberstedt]

• Hierarchical Web-tool for MS PLBR core concept/outcomes/learning objectives (S19)
• Feedback from stakeholders / other universities outside ISU (F19)
• Public availability of Web-tool via NRSP10 (2020)
• Establish management team of Web-tool for further development (assignments; learning materials)

Objective 5. Foster communication among public plant breeders and federal agencies on public policy issues, including alerts to existing and emerging threats to agricultural security that are relevant to plant breeding. [Lead Drs. Mikey Kantar and Mike Gore]

• Build on the communication materials developed to reach more students and continue to make all materials available to the plant breeding community and broader public.
• Establish dissemination of the information to the state representatives from the PBCC leadership, to ensure continuity which is especially important when the administrators change and are not from the agricultural background.

Other goals:

• Develop renewal plan and establish ad hoc writing committee
• Increase number of states represented in SSC80 and encourage participation by state reps in development of renewal objectives
• Continue to update and add content to PBCC webpages
• Create strategic plan with NAPB for improved alignment towards NAPB/PBCC common goals

Minutes for PBCC annual business meeting 2019 Pine Mountain, GA August 25, 2019

Opening Comments:

Introductions: Ksenija Gasic, PBCC current Chair; Mikey Kantar, incoming chair; Rich Pratt, incoming vice chair; Wayne Smith, incoming secretary, and Kate Evans, past Chair. Full attendance list at the end of the document.

Overview:

Many people have been involved since the inception in 2005. We currently have 44/50 states represented, we are still missing Alaska, Idaho (Jack Brown agreed to serve. KG will get in touch with Jack to sign him up), Missouri, Massachusetts (Brook Moyers agreed to serve, MK will get in touch to sign her up), Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Currently we are in the fourth year of the 5-year project. We need to plan strategic planning meeting for writing the renewal. We are still getting up to $6K per year for PBCC activities from NAPB, which has been useful for getting plant breeding representatives to events, manuscripts, printing costs, and travel. PBCC reps are encouraged and welcome to become more involved in the project by participating and or leading one or more objectives they find interesting. Activities are not limited to the executive committee.

KG represented PBCC at the NPGCC meeting in June, Washington D.C. “NPGCC … serve as a vehicle for improving communications and discussions about issues impacting the NPGS with ARS, SAES, and NIFA”.  (http://escop.info/committee/national-plat-germplasm-coordinating-committee-npgcc/). PBCC is not an official npgcc member, but rather an accepted listener/ stakeholder /input contributor. KG introduced the agenda and current and past PBCC leadership. Administrative advisor Eric Young is ending his involvement with PBCC, and NIFA representative Ann Marie Thro is retiring from federal service.

A motion was submitted by Rich Pratt: “Be it resolved that PBCC wishes to acknowledge the many contributions of Dr. Eric Young, and Dr. Ann Marie Thro, to Plant Breeding, as they plan for retirement.”  Motion carried by unanimous acclaim. KG presented brief history of the PBCC and proposed to have the PBCC meeting within the NAPB conference (in the middle not at the beginning), to encourage participation of the NAPB members and graduate students.

Ann Marie Thro presented overview of the PBCC Service and Leadership. She covered origin of multi state projects (MSP), coordinating committees (CC) and the intended roles of these committees, provided few examples of current multistate projects and explained the similarities and difference between the multistate projects and coordinating committees. Quick overview of the establishment of the Plant Breeding CC and accomplishments lead into suggested ideas to consider for renewal (2020-2025). Main message was to keep in mind the Agricultural Research, Extension, & Education Reform Act (AREERA), 1998 outcome types of CC’s when defining the objectives of the renewal project and specifically be aware of the commitment needed to complete proposed objectives. Acknowledge PBCC whenever appropriate to communicate success and importance of the work we are all doing.  

Objective 1: Collect, analyze, and disseminate information about the U.S. plant breeding effort in both public and private sectors, to include human capacity and access to enabling knowledge, technologies, germplasm, and infrastructure.

The public plant breeding program survey data was compiled into a preliminary report (see appendix). Preparation of a publication is on-going with the aim of submission in December of 2019. Following our attempts to publicize this effort (at NAPB 2018 and ASHS 2019), an additional 79 programs have registered with the NRSP10 bringing the total to 366 that are searchable on the interactive U.S. map https://www.nrsp10.org/. The poster describing this effort will also be presented at the Tri-Societies meeting in November where it will hopefully encourage more breeders to register. The goals in the next year are to publish the results, but also develop this survey as a time series where breeders can log in and fairly easily update their information within each 5-year PBCC renewal. The timing of the 5-year repeat is important we want to align the survey with governmental 5-year plans to be in sync with government funding. The breeding programs are recorded by the crop since many breeders are working on more than one crop.

The private sector survey will focus on understanding the educational profile of the future workforce. Since they typically publish what they are willing to say decision was made to extract information from the annual reports that matches the public survey. There is potential to tie this into PBCC objective four to see what education private breeding companies are looking for in the future workforce. The survey would connect to previously conducted Plant Breeding Education Delphi Study to ensure comparativeness between the studies. Allan VD offered to provide all the information regarding the Delphi study for the development of the survey. Delphi study was targeted to the experts and provides an excellent start for survey development since it is 10 years past the Delphi study. If you are interested in participating, contact Ksenija and or Wayne Smith.

Objective 2: Promote the conservation, characterization, and utilization of plant genetic resources and access to those resources for plant breeding.

Several major accomplishments were completed under this objective: (1)organizing the symposium ‘Unlocking Plant Genetic Diversity for Food and Nutritional Security’ at the 2016 annual meeting of AAAS; (2) publishing a white paper on making the USDA National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) more relevant to plant breeding; (3) hosting a Genebank Training Workshop to develop a strategy for training the next generation of genebank managers and users. The workgroup is currently working on creating online modules that can be used by professors in their classes as well as in NPGS training programs. A Survey on Plant Genetic Resources Learning Materials was conducted online for two weeks in March 2019. It was advertised broadly to crop science, horticultural, seed trade, and plant genetic resources communities. Over 600 responses were received of which 524 were useable. The publication on the results of the survey has been accepted for publication in Crop Science. Pat Byrne, Gayle Volk, and others have submitted a proposal “Enhancing Educational Outcomes for Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Use” to USDA-NIFA Higher Education Challenge Program with objectives to develop and organize learning resources (videos, ebook chapters, images etc.) covering PGR topics; establish online repository to host, organize, and track usage of the developed content; develop and offer three 1-credit graduate-level modules on PGR conservation and use in plant breeding and genetics; and disseminate the developed material broadly to communities of interest. Development of two infographics on Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Use was contracted with artist Leah Kucera and supported by funding from NAPB. The target is to present these infographics at the Tri-Societies meeting in 2020. Given the number of activities, There is a desire to increase the size of the team working on this objective.

Objective 3: Identify Best Management Practices for public sector intellectual property protection to encourage the creation and distribution of improved crops for a broad range of needs and opportunities.

Outcome of this objective (IPR practices) have been found useful for and Land Grant University in developing their own IPR policy. Even though there was no major activity in this objective in the past year Bill Tracy has continued to work on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), communicating IPR issues to tech transfer professionals and tech transfer officers (https://agronomy.wisc.edu/ipr-summit/. University of Hawaii did not have the IPR developed and they invited Bill Tracy to help them develop their own IPR practices based on the general document from the PBCC IPR summit.

Objective 4: Optimize opportunities for public-private collaboration in plant breeding research and education, including continuing education for plant breeders.

The current focus is working on a common core for plant breeding that can be transferred across institutions. This has been done in the context of developed online degree programs and comparing the skills gained to what is expected in both the public and private sectors. This is also the case with respect to international constraints. This pedagogy work has been done in collaboration with education researchers as well. This leads to common standards and language regarding what students should know and what results in a professional when they graduate from a program. This is done in context of Bloom’s taxonomy; this standardization leads to greater transferability. The current model is based on the hierarchical model. In the absence of funding for this activity software FreeMind has been used. The common core allows one to zoom in and zoom out with regard to the understanding of the students, it allows for scaffolding and level adjustment. It also allows for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of any given cohort of students. Recently connection has been made with Dorrie Main and NRSP10 project to develop the tools and host the data at the NRSP10 website. The current state of the list has been presented for core categories and how more detailed information can be accessed through the layers of each major core competency category. This tool was used as internal communication tool at Iowa State University to identify redundancies, and gaps, and also to discuss sequence of courses. There were different rounds of review and the core competency list was agreed upon and the list has been and is being shared outside ISU to external colleagues to obtain feedback on completeness and to explore to which level and depth the teaching on these subjects should go for different levels (undergraduate, graduate etc.). Following similar idea as presented in objective 2 for Plant Genetic Resources education. The next steps are to develop web-based system, to enable regular discussions in the plant breeding community, what is core for graduate level education. This tool could be further developed to incorporate tests, quizzes or similar, to determine, which competencies are mastered by students.

At this moment there is no connection with the learning tools but that is something that could be added through different layers once the web-based tool is developed. It would be very useful for students that are transferring between institutions and to learn where the gaps are that need to be filled. Question is how would it be managed and who would be responsible for management and update of the content? There would have to be a committee that would request input form the community to decide what content should be added, removed or updated, based on the feedback which could be endorsed by PBCC and NAPB.

Objective 5: Foster communication among public plant breeders and federal agencies on public policy issues, including alerts to existing and emerging threats to agricultural security that are relevant to plant breeding.

The communication objective has progressed this year. The Cornell Alliance for Science material from the Science communication workshop for Plant science (http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/07/workshop-trains-plant-scientists-communicate-science) held few years ago is available upon request. Science art collaboration was established, and funding obtained to work with the San Diego Botanical garden and AAAS to organize workshop on development of infographic on plant sciences. We paired up with the artist to work on development of infographics. It works very well if the artist/scientist pair has interest in the topic. Paper “Science-graphic art partnership to increase research impact” was published in Communication Biology 2:295 (2019). It is advisable to budget for this activity in grant proposals, so the outcomes of the grants are developed by artists. The impact is much higher than the cost of the infographic development. Artist names are available upon request and some of them are also published in the above article. Templates on how to write the blog, do an interview etc. are downloadable from the NAPB website as well as the best practices worksheets (https://www.plantbreeding.org/files/napb/science-communication-for-plant-breeding-tips-combined.pdf).

There needs to be a better dissemination of the information to the state representatives from the PBCC leadership. It is especially important when the administrators change and are not from the agricultural background.

Renewal

The discussion regarding the PBCC renewal was captured in real time on the google doc that Mikey Kantar created and provided link to all state representatives (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CPiuoQNGaVrfxEaisZydWiJYJShHfjB2L-UwUmp_2wk/edit?usp=sharing). Comments and discussions on each objective of the current proposal were captured in real time, focusing on which portions of the objectives were complete, which needed more development, and which needed to be repeated. The discussion was based on the current project objectives with changes and additions being made as the discussion developed. The proposed points for discussion were: 1) defining objectives for the PBCC over the next five years; 2) designate the lead scientists for each potential objective; 3) Designate a writing committee; and. 4) develop the timeline for finalizing the renewal process. At the time of this report, the PBCC is considering ten potential objectives that build on the work of the last five years. The major goal for the renewal is to continue to encourage the state representatives to publish results related to the objectives for the larger plant breeding community and encourage the development of teams that represent broad geographies to tackle issues at multiple scales (local, regional, and national).

2018/2019 PBCC Accomplishments:

• The initial phase on the U.S. public sector breeding capacity survey, in partnership with NIFA NRSP10 and NSF PGRP projects (PI: Dorrie Main) and Michael Coe (Cedar Lake Research Group), has been completed and the preliminary report has been generated (see appendix). Publication of the responses obtained is in preparation.
• Survey was answered by plant breeding programs from 44 states representing 287 breeding programs and crops that are categorized in fourteen major groups as defined by the U.S Department of Agriculture.
• The survey effort was publicized via poster presentations at the NAPB 2018 and 2019, and ASHS 2019. s a result, 366 breeding programs are currently registered on the NRSP10 map (https://www.nrsp10.org/pbcc-survey-geomap). Number of breeding programs represents number of different crops being bred rather than actual programs since many breeders are involved in breeding more than one crop. Poster printing and conference attendance was funded by the NAPB.
• Publication of the report from the Genebank Training Workshop co-hosted by USDA-ARS National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation (NLGRP) and Colorado State University entitled ‘Training in Plant Genetic Resources Management A Way Forward’ by G.M. Volk, D. Namuth-Covert and P.F. Byrne, 2019. Crop Science 59:853–857 doi:10.2135/cropsci2018.11.0689. Funding of $1,000 was received from the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB) to publish this as an Open Access paper.
• One of the outcomes of the Genebank Training Workshop was the ‘Survey on Plant Genetic Resources Learning Materials’, conducted in March 2019. Results of the survey were summarized in a manuscript accepted for publication in Crop Science.
• A proposal ‘Enhancing Educational Outcomes for Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Use’ was submitted to the USDA-NIFA Higher Education Challenge Grant Program to develop online courses and training materials on plant genetic resources.
• Development of Infographics on plant genetic resources conservation and use was contracted with artist Leah Kucera. NAPB provided $2,000 for this initiative.
• Ksenija Gasic represented PBCC at the NPGCC meeting in June, Washington D.C.
• Core outcome/concept/learning objective lists were generated for all eight Iowa State University MS Plant Breeding courses. A partnership with the NIFA NRSP10 and NSF PGRP projects (PI: Dorrie Main) was initiated to create online access to the core concept list and obtain feedback from stakeholders (other universities outside the ISU).
• Publication ‘Science-graphic art partnerships to increase research impact’ by Khoury et al (2019) Communication Biology 2:295, reported outcomes of “The Speaking Science” workshop (http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/07/workshop-trains-plant-scientists-communicate-science). Workshop was supported by CALS and the Alliance for Science.
• In collaboration with San Diego Botanical Garden, Leichtag foundation ($10000) and AAAS ($3000) a funding was obtained (from these institutions) to develop eight infographics focused on plant science.

A series of best practices worksheets on plant breeding communication are available at https://www.plantbreeding.org/files/napb/science-communication-for-plant-breeding-tips-combined.pdf.

• Publication of the report from the Genebank Training Workshop co-hosted by USDA-ARS National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation (NLGRP) and Colorado State University entitled ‘Training in Plant Genetic Resources Management A Way Forward’ by G.M. Volk, D. Namuth-Covert and P.F. Byrne, 2019. Crop Science 59:853–857 doi:10.2135/cropsci2018.11.0689. Funding of $1,000 was received from the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB) to publish this as an Open Access paper.
• One of the outcomes of the Genebank Training Workshop was the ‘Survey on Plant Genetic Resources Learning Materials’, conducted in March 2019. Results of the survey were summarized in a manuscript accepted for publication in Crop Science.
• Publication ‘Science-graphic art partnerships to increase research impact’ by Khoury et al (2019) Communication Biology 2:295, reported outcomes of “The Speaking Science” workshop (http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/07/workshop-trains-plant-scientists-communicate-science). Workshop was supported by CALS and the Alliance for Science.
• A series of best practices worksheets on plant breeding communication are available at https://www.plantbreeding.org/files/napb/science-communication-for-plant-breeding-tips-combined.pdf.