Institut für Resistenzforschung und Stresstoleranz
Guaranteeing yield, quality, and safety of cereal crops requires increasing the resilience and plasticity of crops to increasingly challenging and adverse environmental conditions. However, thus far, cereals have not been bred sufficient for resilience. Hence, cereal productions are highly dependent on high inputs of chemical fertilizers to boost yield, coupled with fungicides to protect from harmful pathogens such as Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) of cereals and Septoria Tritici Blotch (STB) of wheat. The ambition of CerealBio is to enhance the resilience and productivity under reduced chemical inputs and changing climatic conditions of the major EU cereal bread wheat and the regionally important cereals durum wheat and oats. The CerealBio evidence-based hypothesis is that crop resilience and sustainability can be achieved by breeding for traits that allow plants to positively synergize within the field environment/ecosystem, which includes soil resources, the above and below-ground microbiota, and the community of other crop plants. The feasibility of this goal is ensured by the wide genetic biodiversity for plant traits involved in the plant/ecosystem cross-talk and their importance as determinants of the effective integration of crop plants within their environment.
Europäische Union
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
