Which of the following seeds are pulse crops in Alberta?
build these competencies
science and research on Alberta’s farms
Seed and plant diversity are important aspects of the research that farmers depend on.
Watch this original project AGRICULTURE video interview to find out about the role that research and science plays.
What types of technologies have had the most impact on these farmer’s food production?
starting with seeds
Biotechnology is used to improve the seeds available to farmers, providing them with new ways to combat weeds, insects and other challenges, and produce more food.
Scientists learn about the genes that control different traits by taking small seed fragments to study in labs and by planting the rest of the seed to study the plant that grows. This allows them to identify the genes in the seeds and the plants that control different characteristics.
These seeds are the basis of all crops. Some crops are harvested for their fresh fruits, while others for the stems, leaves, roots or tubers. Some are harvested for their seeds – including all cereal crops, pulses and oilseeds like canola.
Seeds are important because they are nutrient dense. They provide protein, carbohydrates and oil that can be harvested, stored for longer periods of time and, in some ways, more easily transported. Seeds are used to produce several food items. They are also an important source of animal feed for livestock production.
Crop seeds therefore have two main functions – they provide the starting point for growing crops and they are also consumed as food or feed. Most of the seeds harvested for food or feed come from species of two main families – grasses and legumes.
How many different food items that come from harvested seeds can you identify?
crop seed examples
This illustration shows the structure of wheat and bean seeds. A bean seed, a dicot, is on the left and a wheat grain, a monocot, is on the right.
What are two similarities or differences you notice between these different crop plant seeds?
This illustration shows more parts of the pea seed.
Crop plants can be classified as monocots or dicots, based on traits like the number of cotyledons, or seed leaves, they develop in the seed.
These names come from the number of cotyledons or seed leaves that the embryonic seedling has within its seed. A monocot, which is short for monocotyledon, will have only one cotyledon and a dicot, or dicotyledon, will have two cotyledons.
Case in Point – Pulses
Pulses are the dry seeds of legume plants. Their seeds tend to be larger than those of seeds from crops of the grasses family. The exceptions are chickpea and lentil seeds, which tend to be a bit smaller than other pulses.
A pea seed has much the same parts as other legume seeds. It consists of the seed coat, called the testa, the seed leaves, called cotyledons, and the embryo axis.
The seed coat encloses and protects the cotyledons and the embryo axis. The two cotyledons protect the embryo axis and provide nutrients during establishment. The embryo axis is comprised of a rudimentary root, called the radicle, and a shoot, called the plumule.
finding evidence in the seeds
Grain, oilseed and pulse seeds are hard, dry and small. This allows them to be more easily stored and transported than other types of vegetable and fruit crops.
Consider the following article excerpts. The first article from an organization in the UK about Crop Domestication describes how we know when crops were domesticated for human use. The second article excerpt, from Food in Canada online magazine, describes research that shows that the wheat grown by Canadian farmers today is nutritionally similar to wheat grown in 1860.
How is the domestication of crops over time an example of biotechnology?
Why do you think the nutritional profile of wheat varieties may have stayed the same over time?
Crop domestication has been a defining feature of mankind for over 10,000 years, but how have our crops changed over this period of time?
How can we be so sure about when crops became domesticated? The answer lies in the grain. At certain archaeological sites in the Fertile Crescent dating back to 10,000 – 14,000 years ago, amongst the shards of pottery and other Neolithic human leftovers, were seeds.
Not any old seeds.
At the base of wheat grains is the rachis – the part of the seed that connects the grain to the plant. Normally, the rachis would be smooth; in the wild it is necessary for a wheat plant to shed its seed when the time is right, a process called “grain shattering”.
These seeds, however, had a jagged rachis – a clear sign of threshing.
This is the first known evidence of true crop domestication. Humans must have discovered some non-dehiscent mutants (naturally occurring plants that didn’t drop their seed) and worked out (or blundered their way through blissfully unaware) that they could grow these, and then choose the right time for threshing.
Excerpted from Bickerton, P. (June 14, 2016). Sticky seeds and selective breeding: The cradle of civilisation. Earlham Institute: Online. www.earlham.ac.uk/articles/sticky-seeds-and-selective-breeding-cradle-civilisation
Canada’s modern wheat grain hasn’t changed since 1860
University of Saskatchewan researchers have found that the agriculture industry hasn’t altered the nutritional makeup of the wheat grain consumed today in Canada
If you think the wheat you consume today is vastly different from what Canadians were consuming more than 100 years ago – you’d be wrong. New research shows that the nutritional composition of modern wheat is actually quite similar to wheat that was grown in Canada 150 years ago….
The researchers took seeds from 37 varieties of wheat representing grain from each decade from the 1860s onwards. They grew the wheat and then compared the nutritional composition against modern Canada Western Red Spring varieties in field trials over 2013 and 2014.
The research team then analyzed the concentration of starches and proteins including gluten.
What they found is that wheat grain today has a very similar nutritional composition to wheat grown more than 150 years ago.
