“Breeding companies have been eagerly awaiting this for a long time,” begins Sjaak van der Ploeg, Breeding & Strategy Lead at the Dutch company Axia, which focuses on vegetable crop breeding, particularly tomatoes. “Many countries have more liberal legislation regarding this.”
“If the European seed breeding sector wants to remain competitive, we simply must keep up,” says Sjaak, referring to the sentiment around the likely upcoming relaxation of EU GMO legislation. That should, from 2028, allow the use of New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) under certain conditions.
Sjaak, though, tempers the high expectations of those techniques. “People think NGTs will accelerate breeding. And for the more general problems, like powdery mildew, which affects many different crops and where much is already known about the gene, that will certainly be the case.”
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He believes it will be different for more complex problems involving multiple genes or for unknown traits, many of which have sequences and DNA that must still be mapped. “But NGTs will certainly help, even if, in 2028, they don’t immediately yield an abundance of crop characteristics. Plus, there are always still developments in conventional breeding,” Sjaak explains.
