Research News

Cereals diversity projects to enhance European food supply resilience and security

  • 14 November, 2022

 

Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Martin Heydon TD has announced funding for two tillage focused research projects from a European agrobiodiversity research call that will benefit from €1 million in funding. 

Professor Fiona Doohan, UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science and member of UCD Institute of Food and Health and UCD Earth Institute, is coordinator of 'Identification and sustainable deployment of wheat genetic diversity to enhance the resilience and security of the European food supply,' (€499,693) in partnership with Teagasc. Dr Angela Feechan, UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science, and Associate Professor Tancredi Caruso, UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science are collaborators on the project. 

Dr Sonia Negrao, also UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science and member of UCD Institute of Food and Health and UCD Earth Institute, is the Irish partner on 'Recovering and exploiting old and new barley diversity for future-ready agriculture,'(€496,505) led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), in collaboration with Associate Professor Tancredi Caruso.

Minister Heydon said: "These two projects will provide practical knowledge on how diversity can improve our agricultural systems. They will focus on improving the resilience of barley and wheat crops across the EU, two of its most important crops. A central element of the Food Vision 2030 Strategy is to restore and enhance biodiversity and this investment in research I am announcing today will be an important contributor to delivering on this commitment."

The Minister also announced the launch of a new online dashboard that offers the public access to a range of information and statistics on research being funded by the Department. 

He said: "This Department is a significant funder of public-good research in Ireland, having invested over €207m since 2010. It is crucial we continue to invest in modernising and increasing the resilience of our agri-food systems. The research we fund plays a crucial role in that and it is important that it can be accessed by the public and stakeholders alike."

The research awards arise from a joint call run by the European Joint Programme Initiative. Financial support for Irish researchers in these successful projects (that also involve partners from other EU countries) is being provided through the DAFM Research Programme.

 

WheatSecurity

Professor Doohan's project, 'Identification and sustainable deployment of wheat genetic diversity to enhance the resilience and security of the European food supply,' will harness genetic resources and agrobiodiversity in order to increase the resilience and sustainability of wheat production in biogeographically and climatically diverse zones across the EU. 

The team will cultivate diverse germplasm panels in sites across Europe under sustainable cultivation conditions and will assess agronomic performance, quality, abiotic and biotic stress resistance/tolerance, as well as interaction with microbial ecosystem components.

The resilience of diverse wheat varieties to different environmental conditions, and multiple stress responses, will be assessed and demonstrated to end users (farmers, breeders, processors, policy makers). Grain nutritional quality and industrial processing quality will be assessed.

These studies will enhance our understanding of the resilience of different wheat varieties, and guide the development of cultivation practices adapted to specific environmental niches. This research will also demonstrate how to rapidly expedite the development of cultivars imbued with morpho-physiological features that meet the EU Green Deal ecological objectives. 

WheatSecurity will improve understanding of ecosystem functions and enhance our ability to increase the functional genetic diversity base of wheat, thereby enhancing the sustainability of Europe’s food production systems.

 

Barley diversity
 
Barley is one of the main crops in Europe in terms of area under cultivation, economic output and agroecological impact. Barley's success relies on an extraordinary genetic diversity that allowed its adaptation to environments far removed geographically and climatically from its centre of origin. 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 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. This project builds on a rich catalogue of germplasm, a variety of approaches addressing the use of barley diversity in novel ways, and a solid foundation of previous knowledge (genotypic, phenotypic and functional) built during past collaborations.
 
Dr Negrao and team will explore a variety of approaches to broaden barley's genetic base and its impact at different scales: 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 crop growth models applied to genomic prediction with newly unravelled genetic diversity; and evaluation of soil microbiota diversity dynamics in relation to barley diversity.