Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

PBCC Accomplishments and Impacts 2023/24

The Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee (SCC80) has continued to identify and undertake specific initiatives and activities that address systemic issues facing plant breeding in the public sector while supporting all organizations served by the discipline. In alignment with its four objectives, the committee has served the national plant breeding community by assembling and disseminating information about US plant breeding, promoting plant breeding relative to national goals/needs, enhancing communication about plant breeding impacts and issues, and supporting plant breeding education.

Accomplishments: 2023-2024

• Building on the extensive feedback received during the 2023 PBCC Annual Business Meeting, the committee envisioned, planned, and led a day-long conference on the topic of supporting successful transitions in public plant breeding programs. With support from by a USDA Conference Grant, the meeting convened a diverse group of 36 participants from the public, private, non-profit, and government sectors. As shown in the conference program (see Business Meeting Minutes, Appendix D), the morning was dedicated to consideration of eight in-depth transition case-studies, followed by a full afternoon of small group discussions and reporting out on the following four focus areas: 1) Data management for successful breeding program transitions; 2) Designing strategic personnel overlap; 3) Best practices in program valuation and IP management; and 4) Documenting breeding program methods and operational knowledge. Key insights related to programmatic and institutional best practices were identified with potential to address the systemic vulnerability that program transitions pose in the public breeding sector. Through this work, the PBCC has effectively elevated the issue of germplasm transitions nationally. The conference ended with a plan for developing and submitting a white paper on the subject by the end of the calendar year.

• Concerted effort resulted in essentially doubling SCC80 membership, from only 21 states represented in the project in September 2023 to a current total of 40 states and territories, some of which had never been part of SCC80 before. Increasing interest and engagement in PBCC’s work was similarly reflected in the large attendance at its 2024 Annual Business Meeting, including seven graduate students (a group never before involved in PBCC work).

• Responses to the committee’s 2023 Survey of U.S. Public Plant Breeding Capacity were collected, and the initial curation of those 244 responses is complete. As a core activity of the committee, this survey is conducted every five years to assess national public plant breeding to meet societal needs. The survey focuses on resource allocation (personnel time, financial resources, and level of local, state, and federal support) to identify what challenges are common among public plant breeding programs. Data analysis is underway, with the goal of sharing results by the end of the calendar year.

• To ensure effectiveness and avoid redundancy in achieving its objectives, the PBCC continues to actively communicate and partner with allied organizations such as the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB), the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA), USDA, the Seed Science Foundation, and related professional societies. Toward this end, communication channels with the NAPB have been formalized, with the PBCC Chair now attending monthly NAPB EC+ meeting and one member of the PBCC EC serving as an ex officio member on NAPB’s Advocacy Committee.

• The PBCC website (https://www.nrsp10.org/PBCC) continues to be updated and improved, with links to key committee outputs, including white papers, informational resources, public breeding communication pieces, and an updated directory of State Experiment Station Directors, Deans, Associate Deans of Research, or other university administrations responsible for agricultural research at 1862, 1890, and 1994 land-grant universities

• Two more plant breeding success stories, one focused on NIR-based quantitation of dry matter in cassava and the other on breeding for sawfly resistance in wheat, were created, distributed at the 2024 NAPB annual meeting, and are now digitally available on the PBCC website (https://www.nrsp10.org/PBCC_plant_breeding_outputs)

• Progress continues in developing a set of core educational concepts for training/educating plant breeders at the MS and PhD levels. Because core concepts serve as the foundation for curriculum development and assessment in plant breeding education, their identification ensures that graduate programs align with the needs of both academia and industry. In this activity area, the PBCC prepared a white paper titled "Core Concepts: Roles in Graduate Plant Breeding Education, Curriculum Development, and Monitoring" and submitted two proposals for funding to the USDA NIFA Higher Education Challenge (HEC) Grants Program and the Seed Science Foundation. Although both submissions were unsuccessful, the committee has continued its work identifying and defining core concepts in plant breeding education while also articulating how core concepts differ from fundamental facts, subdisciplines, and specific competencies, thereby maintaining a focus on key ideas critical for understanding the broader discipline. The PBCC-led team spearheading this work includes representatives from academia and the plant breeding industry, ensuring the broad expertise necessary to align educational goals with industry demands. Over the next several months, the team will consolidate its lists of core concepts, gather feedback, and share a revised version with stakeholders. The final concepts will be presented at the 2025 Annual PBCC meeting.

• The PBCC Operational Document continues to be refined and updated. The document provides transparency in how PBCC operates in the effort to ensure continuity in the organization’s work.

Impacts

The PBCC’s work in bringing attention to the pervasive issue of the threat to plant genetic resources during public plant breeding program transitions has effectively elevated awareness of the problem nationally. With the day-long conference on this topic now complete and a summary white paper underway, the PBCC is poised over the coming year to build on this awareness and help develop strategies to address the issue.

The public repository of materials describing the importance and necessity of plant genebanks continues to be available at https://grin-u.org. This site contains self-training information on [1] gene bank fundamentals, [2] collection maintenance, [3] phenotyping and genotyping, and [4] crop wild relatives with multiple topics within each subject. Content continues to be expanded and currently includes nine e-books.

Ongoing development and distribution of comic book-style plant breeding success stories continue to convey the successes and impacts of plant breeding. Designed to be accessible to members of the general public, these resources effectively elevate the value of plant breeding, along with understanding of its goals and methods, to key stakeholders.

A manuscript on communication best practices in the agricultural sciences was published in Agricultural and Environmental Letters:

Kantar MB, Wang DR, Hale I, Pratt RC, Jensen JV, Lewenstein BV (2023) Improving agricultural science communication through intentionality. Agricultural & Environmental Letters, 8(2), e20115.