Time has well and truly flown for The University of Western Australia academics whose research into winged bean has spanned more than five decades.

The UWA Institute of Agriculture Honorary Research Fellow Dr Tanveer Khan first began research into winged bean as an important food legume at the University of Papua New Guinea in the early 1970s.

In 1973, UWA Adjunct Professor William Erskine arrived as a tutor and began assisting the project, later carrying on the work for his PhD (registered at Cambridge University) when Dr Khan returned to Perth.

A report from the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council in 1975 catapulted the winged bean to international fame, referring to it as a ‘supermarket on a stalk’ because it combined the desirable characteristics of the green bean, garden pea, spinach, mushroom, soybean, bean sprout and potato.

As decades passed and Adjunct Professor Erskine turned his research attention to other crops – notably running the lentil breeding program at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) for 18 years – he assumed that his time researching the winged bean would be short-lived.

"During my PhD, the winged bean became my life as PhD projects tend to do, and I never thought I'd return to work on it afterwards. But life is non-linear and unpredictable."

Adjunct Professor William Erskine

 

Since 2010, Adjunct Professor Erskine has been involved with Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) projects on food security in Timor-Leste, which provided an opportunity to quietly resume his winged bean research.

Nineteen new crop varieties were produced from two decades of testing by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and UWA Adjunct Senior Research Fellow Rob Williams under Australian-funded ‘Seeds of Life’ and Agricultural Innovations for Communities (AI-Com) projects, as led by Adjunct Professor Erskine.

Among them were three new varieties of the winged bean, released at a recent ceremony attended by the President of Timor-Leste His Excellency Dr José Ramos Horta.

In an amazing twist, one of the recently released varieties in 2023 was identified by Adjunct Professor Erskine in the 1970s, via a connection made possible through international cooperation in germplasm exchange.

Adjunct Professor Erskine said it was very satisfying to see research he started more than five decades ago come to fruition through these recent varietal releases.

“It’s gratifying that the PhD grunt work was not entirely wasted in a practical sense,” he said.

Image: Adjunct Professor William Erskine, Dr Tanveer Khan (back) and Associate Professor Louise Barton.

AI-Com in-country Research Coordinator Rob Williams said the new varieties had been readily accepted by smallholder farmers across Timor-Leste.

“Child stunting and malnutrition are widespread in Timor-Leste,” Mr Williams said.

“Encouraging the production of high protein winged bean (among other options) has been a key driver of AI-Com crop diversification research towards achieving nutritional food security.”

AI-Com is now in its second phase (AI-Com 2) led by UWA Associate Professor Louise Barton and is focused on adoption pathways for technologies and knowledge developed in the first phase.

It is funded through the ACIAR Crops Research Program and scheduled to run until 2027. Learn more about the project via the ACIAR website.