Plants Under Stress - Preparing Cereal Crops for Climate Change
August 31, 2012PreSens is now involved in the EU FP7 funded project EURoot, which aims to enhance resource uptake from roots of cereal crops. 20 institutions mainly from all across Europe, but also researchers from Japan, Australia, and the US will cooperate to get new insights that might help cultivating crop plants that can maintain growth and performance under stress conditions. PreSens will contribute with the development of imaging systems for metabolites to monitor nutrient flows and gradients.
There are multiple factors that can influence productivity of crop plants. The project focuses especially on water, nitrogen and phosphorous limitations and how resource acquisition by roots is controlled under these stress conditions. The genetic and functional bases of root traits under stress, root-soil interactions, signaling processes in the plants, but also phenotyping of root system architecture traits and enhanced models for predicting the development of the root system architecture under stress conditions will be topics of the investigations.
PreSens is cooperating with botanists to develop imaging systems that allow the visualization of nutrient flows and monitoring of gradients. With the novel sensor systems changes in the microenvironment of roots under stress can be investigated. The non-invasive measurement systems can be applied to living samples and allow monitoring over long time periods - even in growing roots.
The development of new and innovative methods and imaging tools should improve breeding of crop plants with root traits allowing enhanced water and nutrient uptake. In the long term technologies and methods compiled by the cooperation might result in the development of novel cereal cultivars with higher resilience, which will tolerate drought and reduced fertilizer application. This willl help farmers to face the challenges of climate change and uneven rainfalls and meet the demands for sustainable agriculture.
More details on the project can be found on www.euroot.eu!
Contact:
Christina Schlauderer
Communications
PreSens Precision Sensing GmbH
Phone: +49 941 94 27 21 09
E-Mail: christina.schlauderer@presens.de
