Cayo Canela Vieira joined the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station as a soybean breeder in January. He’ll educate plant breeding by the Dale Bumpers School of Agriculture, Meals, and Life Sciences at U of A.
Soybean breeder Cayo Canela Vieira builds a bridge from the previous to the longer term at an agricultural experiment station in Arkansas.
Vieira plans to make use of superior genetic instruments to speed up the event of latest species with enhancements comparable to yield potential, adaptability in huge environments and total resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses.
In January, he joined the Experimental Station and now occupies the workplace utilized by his former mentor and advisor, the late Pengyin Chen. As an assistant professor within the Division of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Sciences, Vieira will even educate plant breeding by the Dale Bumpers School of Agricultural, Meals, and Life Sciences at U of A.
“Arkansas has a tremendous legacy of cultivar growth and has a highly regarded program,” stated Vieira. “We now have a possibility to take this conventional program in a program that could be very data-driven to maximise the genetic good points. Should you can shorten the time to establish superior strains, you possibly can doubtlessly enhance the genetic good points within the reproductive cycle.”
He stated the time it takes to develop a brand new cultivar, seven to eight years, might be minimize in half with trendy “predictive breeding” strategies utilizing genome-wide molecular markers and superior statistics. Plant genetic info is collected early within the reproductive cycle after which used to foretell a trait of curiosity earlier than it will get to area trials.
“The genetic base of recent soy could be very slender,” Vieira stated. “We have now a couple of genetically various accessions that kind the idea of genetics in the USA, however now we have greater than 20,000 that may kind the genetic foundation.”
In plant breeding, a genetically various pressure is plant materials collected at one time from a selected location all over the world. A set of genetically various accessions makes an attempt to seize the genetic variety obtainable to a given species for additional use in genetic and reproductive research.
“There’s a number of genetic variety misplaced throughout domestication and intensive breeding. I hope we will discover and re-breed economically necessary traits that have been misplaced throughout domestication,” Vieira stated.
To attain this, Vieira combines instinct with knowledge analytics. He collaborates with specialists in different areas of plant science comparable to physiology and pathology, together with statisticians and quantitative geneticists. Collaboration is a vital part of his work.
“There’s solely a lot you are able to do by yourself, particularly with breeding the place you want a number of knowledge, which frequently has nice interactions with the setting. The extra collaboration you get, the higher your tasks will probably be,” stated Vieira.
“Dr. Vieira brings expertise, imaginative and prescient, and vitality to soybean farming, and I’m assured he’ll take our program to new heights,” stated Jeff Edwards, chair of Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences. “Soybean breeding is one in all our largest analysis packages, and we’re lucky to draw somebody with Dr. Vieira’s potential to our subsequent era of scientific management and innovation.”
Edwards stated Vieira is “a terrific communicator and a terrific listener” who is keen to work together with Arkansas soybean producers and find out about their wants.
“I do not suppose there may be any doubt that his program will present genetics that replicate the wants of Arkansas farms,” Edwards added.
Soybeans are Arkansas’ high money crop, valued at greater than $1.9 billion and grown on greater than 3 million acres within the state, based on 2022 Arkansas Agriculture Profile. Vieira has already labored on tasks that handle lots of the issues Arkansas soybean farmers face, from illness and pest resistance to broad environmental adaptation and fundamental economics to enhancing yield and oil content material. He was additionally concerned in a research with Chen to establish soybean cultivars which are tolerant of non-target dicamba herbicides.
Whereas enhancements in yield potential and diversifications to environments information soybean plant breeding targets, Vieira stated there are additionally alternatives to enhance shopper traits in edamame and natto soybean varieties by working with native farmers and scientists from different departments.
Vieira got here to the USA in 2014 after finishing his first two years of undergraduate research on the College of São Paulo, Brazil, beneath the tutelage of Paledin Pinheiro. He taught for a 12 months on the College of Minnesota and was a visiting scholar at Purdue College beneath Katie Rennie earlier than incomes his grasp’s and doctoral levels in plant breeding, genetics, and genomics from the College of Missouri-Columbia, with Chen and Henry Nguyen as his advisors. Vieira was awarded a Monsanto Graduate Pupil Scholarship in 2018, was named a Nationwide Plant Breeders Affiliation Borlaug Scholar in 2019 and was awarded a Corteva DELTA Scholarship in 2021.
To be taught extra concerning the Division of Agricultural Analysis, go to the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station web site: aaes.uada.edu. Comply with us on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To be taught extra concerning the Division of Agriculture, go to uada.edu. Comply with us on Twitter at @AgInArk. To seek out out about extension packages in Arkansas, contact your native Cooperative Extension Service agent or go to www.uaex.uada.edu.
In regards to the Agriculture Division: The mission of the College of Arkansas Division of Agriculture is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and households by connecting authoritative analysis with the adoption of finest practices. By way of the Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts analysis and extension work throughout the nation’s historic land grant training system. The Division of Agriculture is one in all 20 entities throughout the College of Arkansas system. It has places of work in all 75 counties in Arkansas and college throughout 5 campuses. The Division of Agriculture on the College of Arkansas presents all extension and analysis packages, providers, and analysis with out regard to race, colour, intercourse, gender identification, sexual orientation, nationwide origin, faith, age, incapacity, marital or veteran standing, genetic info, or different legally protected standing, which is Affirmative Motion / Equal Alternative Employer.