Targetted improvement of crop resilience to temperature stress

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Temperature stresses are a major threat to crop yields. Unlike water stress or nutrient deficiency, the farmer has few options to ameliorate temperature stress. Secondly, climate change is increasing both the frequency and severity of hot summers. Each 1 ºC increase in temperature decreases yields by 2.5-16 %. Moreover, most major crops are affected, even in “optimum” growing areas. In a recent BBSRC-funded project, we discovered how plants (and indeed all eukaryotes) control their response to temperature via the dynamic occupancy of nucleosomes by particular histone types. This fundamental finding opens up an entire area of biology for commercial exploitation, including the ability to precisely engineer optimised temperature responses in crops. This FoF project will (a) test and confirm different molecular strategies to modify plant temperature response and (b) provide and test transgenic barley and brassica materials to test and demonstrate the applications in crop plants.

unavailable