WHEATSECURITY
Identification and sustainable deployment of wheat genetic diversity to enhance the resilience and security of the Eu-ropean food supply
Identification and sustainable deployment of wheat genetic diversity to enhance the resilience and security of the Eu-ropean food supply
Coordinator: University College Dublin - School of Biology and Environmental Science
Scientific Officer: Marco Maccaferri
Duration: 01/02/2023 - 31/01/2026
Research group: Marco Maccaferri, Loredana Baffoni, Antonio Prodi
Wheat is an essential source of human calories and also provides substantial amounts of proteins, vitamins, fibre and phytochemicals. The EU Green Deal challenges farmers to significantly reduce chemical crop inputs by 2030 but will also unlock the opportunity to better maintain and exploit ecosystem biodiversity to support sustainable crop production.
To achieve this, WheatSecurity will harness genetic resources and agrobiodiversity in order to increase the resilience and sustainability of wheat production in biogeographically and climatically diverse zones across the EU.
In order to fulfil these aims, WheatSecurity will select a germplasm panel representing a broad genetic pool covering agroclimatic adaptation and including tetraploid, hexaploid, diverse and elite genotypes. We will cultivate this diverse germplasm panel in sites across Europe under sustainable cultivation conditions (reduced nitrogen, biostimulants, etc.), assessing agronomic performance, quality, abiotic and biotic stress resistance/tolerance, as well as interaction with microbial ecosystem components. The resilience of diverse wheat germplasm to environmental conditions and to mul-tiple stress responses will be demonstrated to end-users (farmers, breeders, processors, policy makers) based on a combination of traditional and high throughput phenotyping, genome-wide association studies, transcriptomics, and DNA-based microbiome studies of roots, leaves and flowering wheat heads. Network and association studies will be used to decipher the linkages between plant performance and genotype x environment x management interactions, and we will test the hypothesis that it is possible to support crop-health through genotype x microbiome interactions. This project will increase the reference database of phenotypes and functional genotypes for accessions under stressed environments, delineating progenitors that can be used to maximise biodiversity and multi-environment, multi-stress resilience. This research will also demonstrate how we can rapidly expedite the development of cultivars imbued with morpho-physiological features that meet the EU Green Deal ecological objectives (i.e. more resilient under low input and biological input cultivation).