RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Overcoming barriers to the registration of new varieties
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.10.08.331892
DO 10.1101/2020.10.08.331892
A1 Chin Jian Yang
A1 Joanne Russell
A1 Luke Ramsay
A1 William Thomas
A1 Wayne Powell
A1 Ian Mackay
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/09/2020.10.08.331892.abstract
AB Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) is an intellectual property system introduced in 1961 by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) for safeguarding the investment and rewarding innovation in developing new plant varieties. Despite the rapid advancement in our understanding of crop biology over the past 60 years, the DUS system has not changed and is still dependent upon a set of morphological traits for testing candidate varieties. As the demand for more plant varieties increases, the barriers to registration of new varieties become more acute and thus require urgent review to the system. To highlight the challenges and remedies in the current system, we evaluated a comprehensive panel of 805 UK barley varieties that span the entire history of DUS testing. Our findings reveal the system deficiencies and provide evidence for a shift towards a robust genomics enabled registration system for new crop varieties.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.