Climate change tolerance in crops

Funding period: 2024-2027
Lead: Stacy Singer
Total GRDI funding: $957,220

It has been proposed that a 60-119% increase in crop productivity will be required by 2050 to meet demand as there will not be much, if any, expansion in arable land area. While this undertaking will itself be a tremendous challenge, doing so under shifting environmental conditions arising from climate change will further complicate matters. As such, we propose to leverage our previous and ongoing research in three important Canadian crops (alfalfa, wheat and canola), in which we have made substantial gains in terms of identifying and functionally characterizing various genes with putative involvement in photosynthesis and abiotic stress tolerance, to unravel the relationship between photosynthetic efficiency and stress response. This project would include physiological and biochemical assessments of abiotic stress (drought and waterlogging) responses in our existing lines that overexpress the photosynthesis-related miR408, as well as RNA-Seq and co-expression network analyses to identify novel candidate genes for breeding purposes. Subsequently, established gene editing technology (CRISPR/Cas9 and/or MAD7) would be used to functionally characterize a range of previously- and newly- identified target genes for downstream functional validation and evaluation of a combinatorial approach. Since enhancements in photosynthesis and stress tolerance both tend to lead to increased biomass and seed yields, such a combinatorial approach has the potential to dramatically improve Canadian crop productivity under a future of climate change.