Student Nadia Smith and Dr. Chase Mason examine pepper plants as part of the Plant Breeding Initiative inside UBC Okanagan's Plant Growth Facility.
Walking into the Plant Growth Facility at UBC Okanagan surrounds you with the familiar, earthy warmth of a greenhouse.
Then someone mentions that the squat little pepper plant near the end of the bench is a Carolina Reaper—one of the spiciest peppers on Earth—and the temperature rises a little.
“It’s over one million Scoville heat units,” says Maggie Woelfing, an undergraduate earth and environmental sciences student from Edson, Alberta, and student leader of the facility.
For reference, a jalapeño registers about 7,000 Scoville heat units.
It feels strange just standing next to the Reaper plant, like it might breathe fire.
“Doesn’t even seem possible,” Woelfing admits, laughing. “But yeah. It’s pretty warm.”
Woelfing didn’t start by running the place. She started where every student in the Plant Breeding Initiative starts by learning the basics, then taking on more.
Student Maggie Woelfing inspects some of the pepper plants at UBCO’s Plant Growth Facility.
The Plant Breeding Initiative is a for-credit program embedded in the Plant Growth Facility, where students work in rotating cohorts to develop new pepper varieties through conventional crossbreeding.
They track growth stages, measure stomata density to test drought resistance, harvest fruit, and run chemical analyses. They design experiments, troubleshoot when crosses fail and learn to lead.
When Dr. Chase Mason launched the PBI, he let students vote on the crop they’d use, and then he let them work.
Peppers won for good reasons: short generation times, easy to crossbreed by hand, culturally meaningful and tangible enough you can taste the results.
The PBI runs on a near-peer model. More experienced students lead projects and mentor those coming up behind them. The lab now holds more than 200 heirloom varieties from five continents, and the students are the ones moving the science forward.
Nadia Smith, an earth and environmental sciences undergraduate from Vernon, was pulled in the way a lot of students are, by her friends.
The Plant Breeding Initiative is where students work in rotating cohorts to develop new pepper varieties through conventional crossbreeding.
Now she’s running her own project, building on other students’ dwarfing work but steering it toward disease resistance. She’s focused on a variety called Arroz con Pollo (“chicken and rice”) which carries an unusually high load of natural resistance to the pathogens and pests that can devastate pepper crops.
The goal is to crossbreed those resistances into more compact, grower-friendly plants.
Why does that matter? Because for plant viruses, there is no chemical fix. You either breed in resistance or you lose the crop.
UBCO students are stacking multiple resistances into single varieties, generation by generation, and the Capsicum baccatum lines are now on their fifth generation, close enough to release that the next step is regional grower trials.
Dr. Mason is clear about what’s actually driving that progress.
“There’s been 30 to 40 students touching these projects over time,” he says. “A constant influx of new creativity from these new students makes the program more impactful than if it were just a top-down program where I was saying, ‘I think we should do this.'”
Meanwhile, the lab is working on something closer to a puzzle: what’s hiding underneath the heat of the world’s spiciest peppers?
Maggie Woelfing is a student leader of UBC Okanagan’s Plant Breeding Initiative.
Students have been crossing extreme varieties—such as the Trinidad Seven Pot or the Moruga Scorpion—with mild ones to knock out the capsaicin (heat) gene and find out what flavours and nutrients lie beneath.
The results are unpredictable. Woelfing has tasted her share of both outcomes.
“One cross tasted just like dirt, unfortunately,” she says.
Others are genuinely tasty, like the variety from Ukraine called Lesya and some of the baccatums. And there’s a new C. baccatum hybrid that the students nicknamed Okanagan Blush that ripens from light green to a pinky-purple blush, then bright orange as the pigments degrade.
“I’m a little biased because it was part of my project,” Smith says. “But it’s gorgeous.”
What drives both students isn’t the flavours or even the science. It’s what the work is preparing them to do next.
Smith is considering a master’s degree focused on food security. Woelfing wants to work on climate-change mitigation through plants; and maybe, one day, run a flower farm. Both are leaving the PBI with skills most undergraduates never get near: leading multi-generational research, mentoring peers, defending their methods.
“I feel really honoured, not just because of something that’ll be released in large amounts, but something that can help local farmers, or anyone who wants to grow peppers, even in their back garden,” Woelfing says. “I think it’s really important to maintain that local connection with our research.”
Nadia Smith joined the Plant Breeding Initiative on the advice of friends and to explore a future in sustainable agriculture.
