Barley is one of the main crops in Europe regarding cultivated area, economic output and agroecological impact. Barley success relies on an extraordinary genetic diversity that allowed its adaptation to highly diverse environments. However, 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 big data produced by the genomic revolution, and re-start a data-driven exploitation of genetic diversity to deliver new diversity based on knowledge acquired.
This project builds on a rich catalogue of germplasm, and a solid foundation of previous knowledge (genotypic, phenotypic and functional) built during past collaborations. We propose a variety of approaches to broaden barley's genetic base: exploration of the wide diversity harboured by old varieties and landraces for adaptation to shifting climates, discovery and deployment of genes affecting key traits, exploration of targeted modification of known genes, improvement of functional in silico crop models to predict future variety performace based on their genomes, with newly unravelled genetic diversity, and evaluation of soil microbiota diversity dynamics in relation to barley diversity.
*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.