You could call soybeans professor Istvan Rajcan’s magic beans.
The legumes have landed Rajcan, a professor of soybean breeding and genetics at the University of Guelph (U of G), with almost $2 million in research grants.
Rajcan said his soybean lab recently received a $500,000 joint grant from Grain Farmers of Ontario, SeCan Association, Huron Commodities Inc. and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
In 2013, it received another $1.4-million grant from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Field Crop Research Alliance through the Growing Forward 2 AgriInnovation Program.
The new funding for Rajcan’s lab, which includes six technicians and nine graduate students, comes at a time when soybean production in Canada is exploding.
According to a U of G news release, Canadian soybean production has increased 450 per cent since 1980.
“In the past decade, soybeans have become Ontario’s largest cash crop,” the release said. “Ontario farmers plant more than two and a half million acres’ worth of soybeans each year.”
Rajcan, who has been studying soybeans at the University of Guelph since 1998, said the main focus of his current research is developing higher yielding varieties of soybeans for Ontario farmers.
“We’re using genomic tools to develop molecular markers to develop new traits in soybeans that could be of interest to the food, feed and processing industries,” Rajcan said. “We’re looking at specific genetic traits in the soybeans, mostly dealing with the seed composition.”
Rajcan said his lab’s research has the potential to also increase sucrose and protein levels in soybeans—something of particular interest to the soy beverage and tofu industries.
But he said the impact of his research “goes beyond the food,” having the potential to affect how auto parts, industrial coatings, and biodiesel are manufactured.
Rajcan said the new funding will mostly pay for salaries and graduate student stipends, but will also cover operating costs and lab equipment.
The grants will cover lab work for the next four to five years.
Related stories:
https://charlatan.ca/2014/03/big-bang-researcher-at-carleton-awarded-funding/
https://charlatan.ca/2014/03/teaching-over-research-could-benefit-universities/
