Coordinator: Institut National de Recherche Agronomique et de l'Environnement (INRAE) Biology and Plant Breeding
Scientific Officer: Elisabetta Frascaroli
Duration: 01/03/2023 - 28/02/2026
Research group: Elisabetta Frascaroli, Silvio Salvi.
Climate change, soil degradation and fertilizer costs threaten food security and agriculture sustainability in Europe. Traditional varieties of crops or landraces are a valuable source of genetic diversity for addressing these challenges. Landraces have been selected for adaptation to local agro-climatic conditions and human uses and could therefore carry favorable alleles for tolerance to abiotic or biotic stresses. However, landraces remain underutilized in modern breeding programs and agriculture because they are poorly characterized, genetically heterogeneous and exhibit lim-ited agronomic performance compared to elite material. Great effort has been recently made to characterize the gen-otypic variation of thousands of maize landraces but few resources have been mobilized for analyzing their pheno-typic variation and genetic diversity for complex traits as tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses. The project Mine-LandDiv (Mining Allelic Diversity in Landraces for Tolerance to Abiotic and Biotic stress) proposes to fill this gap by combining different up-to-date genomic approaches, genetic and statistical methods with high throughput phenotyp-ing tools including sensors / metagenomics for fine environmental characterization.