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 limited agronomic performance compared to elite material. Great effort has been recently made to characterize the genotypic variation of thousands of maize landraces but few resources have been mobilized for analyzing their phenotypic variation and genetic diversity for complex traits as tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses. MineLandDiv project proposes to fill this gap by combining different up-to-date genomic approaches, genetic and statistical methods with high throughput phenotyping tools including sensors / metagenomics for fine environmental characterization. MineLandDiv aims at (i) identifying maize landraces and favorable alleles for tolerance to abiotic (heat/drought - cold - nitrogen) and biotic stresses (Corn borer) that could be used to broaden genetic diversity of modern breeding germplasms and (ii) better understanding their resilience to variable environmental conditions.
*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.