Global warming has a direct impact on agriculture: in general, low water availability and supra-optimal temperatures negatively affect the plant reproductive processes and therefore hamper the normal fruit or seeds development, thus limiting both crop yields and quality of fruit/grain production.
C4C project aims to face the impact of heat and drought stress, in two important botanical families for human food supply: solanaceae and cereals, using eggplant, rice and wheat as target systems. The genomes of these three species have been sequenced, thus allowing the establishment of genomics-driven breeding programs and of reference-guided resequencing approaches to study genetic variation for specific traits. The large amount of germplasm available constitute a great source of variability and will be explored to highlight the genomic regions underlying key genes, some of them already discovered within C4C consortium, and factors involved in plant adaptation and for crop breeding. Moreover, the transfer of the genomic information gained from studies in other species will be explored. All this information will set the basis to transfer the acquired knowledge in breeding processes which will lead to the development of lines with an improved adaptation to adverse conditions caused by global warming and water shortage.
*At the time of the proposal. Please consider this data as an accurate estimate; it may vary during the project’s lifespan.
Total costs include in kind contribution by grant holders and can therefore be higher than the total requested funding.