More food, more knowledge
Developing new plant varieties can help farmers grow more food and adapt to climate change, but they also help scientists learn more about how plants are affected by climate change and ways to refine and improve the plant breeding process.
Over the course of this five-year project, the team created methods for screening the physiological, genetic and molecular components of plants as well as for accurately assessing the plants’ genetic makeup to identify, select and breed plants with desired traits.
A pre-field screening technique, for example, was refined to help plant breeders accelerate the evaluation of plant varieties in controlled conditions such as a greenhouse or growth chamber. This approach allows them to effectively narrow down the number of possible plants for further field tests from a few thousand to less than 100. By slimming down the options, it can reduce research and development time from around three to five years to one year, which means new plant varieties can reach farmers more quickly to help them stay ahead of climate change and prevent food insecurity.
Many of the team’s methods and techniques are now being made accessible to other researchers to research further. They are being made available through IAEA coordinated research and technical cooperation projects with other teams of scientists, as well as through more than 40 publications, including a recently published open-access guidebook on Pre-Field Screening Protocols for Heat Tolerant Mutants in Rice.
“Climate change is identified as one of the major challenges faced by the planet, and crop adaptation to variations in climate is critical to ensure food and nutrition security,” said Fatma Sarsu, an IAEA scientist and the lead officer of the project. “Interdisciplinary research involving plant breeders, physiologists and molecular biologists is key to the development of new varieties adapted to extreme environments such as drought and high temperatures. Our collaborative research is taking a major step towards addressing crop adaptation to climate change through the development of these rice and bean varieties.“
