DENMARK – Danish brewer Carlsberg has made a ground-breaking step towards meeting the food requirements for the expanding global population, in the face of changing climatic conditions through an invention of a non-GMO breeding method called “FIND-IT”.
Scientists at Carlsberg Research Laboratory explained that with rising temperatures and a projection that the current yield increase rates of crops will not accommodate the food requirements of 9-10 billion people by 2050, there is an urgent demand to find ways to sustainably optimize the way people produce crops.
Carlsberg research team led by Prof. Birgitte Skadhauge, Vice President of the Carlsberg Research Laboratory, has now come up with what might be the solution for the future of the increasing population.
The team has invented the FIND-IT technology, Fast Identification of Nucleotide variants by droplet DigITal PCR, published in the latest issue of Science Advances.
FIND-IT enables ultrafast improvement of many different types of plants, such as cereal crops, but also microbes. This includes barley, yeasts, and bacterial strains that are fundamental for brewing, food production, and many industrial processes.
Moreover, FIND-IT accelerates the development process from laboratory to field evaluation and product development and has great potential for sustainable agriculture even outside the world of brewing.
Prof. Birgitte Skadhauge said: “It’s a known fact that we need crops in the future which for example have better quality and a higher tolerance for heat and drought stress. With our technology, we are able to screen extremely large numbers of crop individuals in a very short time and find a specific variant, that tolerates heat or drought better.
Afterward, the isolated variant can be bred into new improved varieties which are able to grow across the world.”
The published results show the commitment of the Carlsberg Research Laboratory and the Carlsberg Foundation, which has contributed with funding to the project, in finding sustainable solutions for the betterment of society.
Prof. Søren-Peter Olesen was proud that the Carlsberg Research Laboratory continues to build on its long scientific reputation with the invention of the FIND-IT methodology, which we believe will prove to be a groundbreaking technology that will empower researchers worldwide to address global challenges.
This brilliant innovation, according to Carlsberg, is housed in what started as a quest to develop a scientific basis for malting, brewing, and fermentation, but has now grown to be a world-leading laboratory for brewing-oriented research.
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