A team of Harper Adams University researchers have been awarded funding for a project boosting climate change resilience in crops.
The project, VeGIN –the Vegetable Genetic Improvement Network, is one of five crop Genetic Improvement Networks (GINs), which will identify and characterise beneficial properties in crops that can be used to develop the varieties of the future.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has awarded VeGIN £3 million of funding to continue its work identifying resilience to environmental, or abiotic, and pest and disease, or biotic, challenges to vegetable crops.
The project is led by principal investigator Dr. Andrew Beacham and co-investigator Prof. Jim Monaghan in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Warwick, the Met Office and an extensive group of industrial stakeholders, including crop breeders and growers.
Dr. Beacham said:
“This continuation of the GINs, including VeGIN, is vital in helping to bridge the gap between fundamental scientific research, crop breeding and production.
“It allows us to work with the breeding and grower communities to identify sources of beneficial traits in crops.
“These traits can then be introduced into existing varieties to provide improved crops better able to withstand the changing climate and biological challenges associated with it.”
Climate change resilience
The project focuses on the four largest UK vegetable crops in terms of production value, namely lettuce, Brassicas, carrot and onions.
The current round of VeGIN will run until 2029 and the work at Harper Adams will investigate crop responses to drought and heat, rooting behaviour and nutrient use efficiency.
Prof. Monaghan added:
“The new VeGIN programme not only allows us to build on our previous work regarding environmental stress resilience in these four crops, but also allows us to expand our research to other species such as coriander, which to date have received limited research attention.”
The work will not only identify the presence of required traits for improved climate resilience but also begin to identify the underlying genes responsible for those characteristics.
This information will help crop breeders to more rapidly exploit the findings of VeGIN through conventional and precision breeding.
“Developing durable crop varieties that can perform well under the growing conditions of the future helps us to safeguard agricultural production and maximise the public good of our research,” Dr. Beacham said.
