Harnessing Light: Plants Provide Food Security
To feed 9 billion people by 2050 is an unprecedented challenge. In agriculture, crop plants are the primary harvesters of light energy and convert it into food sources on which the world is reliant. Rice is the food source for the majority of the world’s population but is also a model for research on how to boost cereal productivity.
Drought and related high salinity during essential periods of plant growth affects nearly all crops including the major cereals, such as rice, causing drastic yield losses. A major goal of plant biology is to develop crop cultivars that are ‘drought and salt resistant’, defined as those that have higher yields than standard cultivars under these environmental stresses. However plant responses to drought and salinity are overlapping and complex involving many physiological pathways controlled by cascades of molecular networks. This makes engineering drought and salt resistance in crops possible but very challenging unless molecular mechanisms are identified (‘Master coordinators’) that can influence multiple signalling networks to produce an integrated stress response. Crop improvement programmes that target these ‘Master coordinators’ will have the greatest potential to increase yield under stress.
As a result of drought and salt stress rice crops lose 75% of their yield potential. Despite having a long history as well as great potential for rice production, the devastating human cost of this yield loss is felt most in Sub Saharan Africa. Improving rice performance in these conditions is among the most serious challenges facing global agriculture.
Drawing on the expertise of plant biologists from the Universities of Durham and Singapore a workshop focused on identifying ways to develop stress adapted high yielding drought and salt resistant rice varieties will be held at Durham University in August 2013. The workshop is by invitation only and will involve a series of talks and sessions aimed at developing collaborative projects in rice and stress tolerance.
For more information please contact Dr Ari Sadanandom (
ari.sadanandom@
durham.ac.uk).
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