Blueberry research bears fruit at SFU greenhouses

Research on off-season berry production is bearing fruit at the Simon Fraser University (SFU) Biotech Greenhouse. A team led by biological sciences professor Jim Mattsson has successfully grown a crop of blueberries indoors during the winter.

Their project, funded by the Weston Family Foundation's Homegrown Innovation Challenge, aims to produce new varieties of blueberries and growing techniques suited to indoor commercial production during the off-season.

Canada's cold winters and short growing season have long been an obstacle for farmers. Over 75% of fruit eaten in Canada is imported, 37% from the United States. Extending the Canadian growing season would not only provide welcome income for farmers, it would strengthen Canada's food security against supply chain disruptions, international trade disputes and uncertainty due to climate change.

Blueberry plants have complex needs for nutrition, pollination and pruning which means that so far no one has successfully grown them indoors at scale.

"It was not so simple to get them to produce," explains Mattsson. "We exposed blueberry plants to the conditions needed to induce flower buds, but if that treatment is too long the plants will go dormant for several months."

The team used tightly controlled lighting and temperature to initiate flower bud formation, before switching to summer-like conditions. The SFU bushes have been producing berries continuously since January and production will likely continue until May.

"We have already shown in a couple of rounds, both with this greenhouse as well as in Chilliwack, that you can produce berries indoors," Mattsson says. "The next step is to scale up and see if we can get the numbers right."

Conversations with local farmers have shown that they are interested if Mattsson's team and their industry partner BeriTech Inc. can show that indoor blueberry production is profitable.

The team is using gene editing to develop new commercial varieties better suited to indoor production. Plants have been bred by humans for thousands of years to select for beneficial qualities such as higher yield and drought or disease resistance. Gene editing allows researchers to mimic this natural process in a faster and more precise way.

"We're trying to introduce two traits into blueberry," Mattsson says. "One is making the plants smaller so they're more manageable. The second is producing earlier and more abundant flowers. This way we will be able to produce more fruits earlier."

The team is targeting a gene that was first identified in rice and wheat over 50 years ago. That discovery enabled plant breeders to develop shorter plants with a substantially higher yield of grain, a development that powered a Green Revolution that is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.

"If you target the right gene you can get a healthy plant that is smaller," Mattsson says, "and it makes it easier with regulation too. Regulators can look at our plants and see that what we did already exists in the market with other crops."

Industry partner BeriTech is working to develop the technology and techniques that will make growing these new varieties viable on a commercial scale.

"We can fine-tune the environment and the way that we manage the plant to drive really rapid growth and high yields of good quality fruit for the lowest energy input," says BeriTech's chief scientific officer, Eric Gerbrandt, "so that we can displace imports during the off-season."

"Gene editing is very big concept economically," adds SFU greenhouse manager Mostafa Mirzaei. "If we produce dwarf varieties [of blueberry] then we can change the cultivation system to vertical farming and decrease the production cost per unit. The cost would be comparable to the field."

The team still has more work to do before locally grown winter blueberries hit the shelves in grocery stores, but they're hopeful that their work will establish a protocol for making further improvements to blueberries and possibly other food crops in the future.

"We're still polishing the protocol and making sure it works correctly," says research assistant Juan Rodriguez Lopez. "These two traits that we are targeting in blueberries could just be the beginning."

Provided by Simon Fraser University