DLF Beet Seed’s plant breeding secures stronger beet plants

Revolutionizing Sugar Beet protection: Unleashing resistant varieties to boost yields and a future free from reliance on chemical fungicides

Aphanomyces cochlioides causes seedling damping-off and root rot disease in sugar beet and destroy the plants, causing vast yield losses. Early attacks can be combated using the fungicide hymexazol, but nothing proves effective later.

Today, all commercial seed are treated with seed care, but in the future, resistance breeding will be a more viable and sustainable strategy for combating damping-off. At DLF Beet Seed, we exploit our resistant germplasm to improve sugar beet resistance and to reduce the use of chemical treatments.

By combining phenotypic data with molecular marker segregation, we identified genes that can affect the beets’ resistance to damping off, and over the next three to five years, we expect our plant breeding to deliver resistant varieties that produce high yields with less input of chemical fungicides.