Old but gold: exploiting the underutilized oilseed Camelina sativa to uncover and promote tolerance to abiotic stress for improving climate resilience in crops

Beschreibung

Camelina sativa (camelina, gold-of-pleasure) is an old, re-emerging European oilseed crop without intense breeding history. Camelina is characterized as a low-input crop for bioenergy as well as for food and feed that can be grown on poor soils and marginal land, and it shows inherent tolerances towards adverse environmental conditions such as heat and drought. Thus, camelina is a promising source of functional diversity and has a great potential as a climate-smart crop needed to cope with climate change-driven challenges in agriculture. To uncover camelina’s stress adaptation strategies, the EU-Horizon 2020 project UNTWIST1 (GA 862524) is using an interdisciplinary systems approach to dissect its multi-layered responses to heat and drought. Screening the performance of 54 genetically diverse lines in field trials as well as under controlled heat and drought conditions combined with genomic and metabolomic analyses allowed the selection of four contrasting focus lines. These lines are further characterized in additional field trials under different cropping systems and complementary large-scale experiments under controlled heat and drought conditions for in-depth analyses. Results of the four focus lines from a controlled drought stress experiment in an automated high-throughput phenotyping setup will be presented in detail. This approach allowed to discriminate differential behaviour of the focus lines under well-watered and drought conditions at multiple morphological and physiological levels through RGB, hyperspectral reflectance, chlorophyll fluorescence and thermal imaging techniques. These results will be integrated with (epi)genomic, physiological, metabolic, proteomic, and transcriptomic data to feed into mechanistic and predictive models and to derive markers for crop improvement. Moreover, implications for the understanding of genetic interplay and plasticity in plant adaptation, which can be exploited for increasing crop yield stability in adverse and changing environmental conditions, will be discussed.2
1 https://www.untwist.eu

Zeitraum	15 Sept. 2024 → 19 Sept. 2024
Ereignistitel	International Conference of the German Society for Plant Sciences
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	Halle (Saale), DeutschlandAuf Karte anzeigen
Bekanntheitsgrad	International