Project summary:

With the intensification of climate change, a new scenario is forecasted in which the world area suffering from drought and heat temperature will dramatically increase, exposing most of the crops to stress during some stages of their life cycle. 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. Crops plants exhibit morphological, physiological, and molecular responses to tackle heat and drought stress which are developmentally regulated, and stage-specific.

C4C focuses on

promoting innovative technology deployment and improving climate resilience against rising temperatures and low water input agricultural practices.

C4C project aims

to understand 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 model systems. The three genomes have been sequenced, thus allowing the establishment of genomics-driven breeding programs and of reference-guided resequencing approaches to study genetic variance in accessions with divergent levels of adaptation.

The main goals of C4C will be:

• the characterization of large rice and eggplant germplasm collections/wild parental lines in drought and heat stress conditions, the identification of genes and molecular traits involved in the response to these stresses and the development of molecular markers linked to the better alleles for improved stress resilience

• to identify the best adapting genotypes to adverse conditions and to provide knowledge and strategies for a sustainable vegetable cropping system in view of water reduction and temperature rising, using rice, durum wheat and eggplant as target species

• to deeply characterize in rice and eggplant species some genes known in to be strictly involved in the response to heat and drought stress in order to speed up the identification process of the major determinants involved in improved resilience to stresses

• to integrate emerging chemical analytical approaches such as cell wall profiling and metabolomics to contribute to a more convincing identification of the chromosomal regions underlying QTLs and moreover, to assist the functional characterization of key genes involved in the response to stresses.

• to initiate a process of utilization of the results and knowledge in genetic improvement activities

The availability of genomes and pan-genomes of the species of interest will allow better exploration of the genetic variability present in available germplasm collections to identify genes involved in drought and high temperature resistance Integration and complementation among genetic tools, exploration of large germplasm collections, innovative analytical techniques such as cell wall analysis will greatly improve the possibility of identifying and characterizing chromosomal regions, alleles and genes involved in stress response. The results that will be obtained and the knowledge gained can be exploited in genetic improvement activities for the development of genetic materials with improved adaptation to adverse conditions due to rising temperatures and drought.