Improving crop yield by enhanced plant performance under stress conditions

Concert-Japan

Funded by 

Over the course of millions of years, plants have evolved in close vicinity with other organisms. Particularly in the rhizosphere, plant development and contemporary ecology has been shaped by their constant interaction with a plethora of soil microbes. Reportedly, these interactions can have direct impact on plant fitness, including stimulated plant productivity and induced resistance to pathogens. In the IPSC project we apply a holistic scientific approach to address the question of how plants benefit from the symbiosis with the root-colonizing endophytic fungus Piriformospora indica. The goal of the project is to disclose the molecular mechanism(s) triggered by the symbiosis with the fungus that render(s) host plants more productive in terms of biomass production and yield, and more resistant to prevailing abiotic stresses. Given the fact that P. indica shows an enormously broad host spectrum, the key hypothesis of the project is that the beneficial effects of the symbiosis are based on conserved recognition and signaling processes, rather than specific host-symbiont interactions. This assumption makes it tempting to speculate that obtained data can directly be harnessed to improve the productivity and yield of agriculturally relevant crops, particularly under environmental stress condition, such as drought, salinity, and nutrient limitation, by employing a biotechnological approach. Facing the prevailing global climate change as a consequence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission, including current climatic models predicting temperature increases of 2-5°C, reduced annual rainfalls, and increased vapor pressure deficit and evaporation even for large parts of moderate climate regions, global food production is in jeopardy. The results of the IPSC project are expected to mitigate the risk of reduced agricultural productivity, as they will offer the possibility and accelerate the production of new high-performance crop lines through the identification of novel molecular targets and mechanisms.

Members: Stephan Pollmann (Project leader Europe), Spain; Hitoshi Sakakibara (Project leader Japan), Japan; Anne Krapp, France; Jutta Ludwig-Müller, Germany; Ralf Oelmüller, Germany; Jesus Vicente-Carbajosa, Spain; Stephane Lafarge, Biogemma, France