Project_
1,755,000
euros.
36 months
01/2023 to 12/2025.
9 partners
from 7 countries.
Challenges_
Future breeding must respond to the sum of challenges posed by a changing climate, increasing resource limitation, and the societal mandate for sustainable production and environment-aware agriculture. Plant scientists must rethink the processes that shaped crop adaptation, harness the wealth of scientific knowledge generated during the genomic revolution, and re-start a data-driven exploitation of genetic diversity to harness new diversity based on knowledge acquired. RecoBar addresses the following specific challenges:
- Harnessing extant barley diversity to expand the crop genetic base.
- Mining new traits and Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) for tolerance to abiotic stresses with new and old diversity.
- Barley ideotyping for future agroecosystems.
- Rhizosphere microbiota associations with crop diversity and environmental conditions.
Objectives_
RecoBar aims at supporting barley-based agroecosystems, combining the goals of fostering agrobiodiversity while increasing crop productivity, under the climate change challenges. The specific objectives are:
- Exploration of the wide diversity harbored by old local and traditional varieties and landraces for adaptation to shifting climates and low input agriculture.
- In depth exploration of functional diversity: discovery of traits and genes affecting key abiotic stress response traits.
- Exploitation of functional diversity through targeted modification of known genes affecting resilience traits.
- Improvement of functional crop growth models applied to genomic prediction with newly unraveled genetic diversity
- Evaluation of richness and dynamics of rhizosphere microbiota linked to genotypic diversity and environmental factors.
