Climate change in becoming a major issue for plant breeding. Increased intensities and frequencies of drought and heat stresses and novel pathogens invading Europe represent a major challenge. Unfortunately, over the course of this project, the agricultural situation in Europe has rapidly worsened: We are now facing major droughts, temperature extremes and war which all affect food security not only in Europe. Unfortunately, it is now clear that crop breeding is advancing slower than climate change. To ensure food security in Europe and elsewhere, rapid advances in crop breeding must be made.
And yet, in this emergency context the EU keeps a blind eye on scientific evidence: Currently, novel methods that could greatly increase crop breeding speed, such as gene editing, are effectively prohibited. At the start of this project, we were convinced that our novel breeding method, which does not involve transgenesis at any step, would not produce plants that could be considered as GMOs.
In this context, the BUNGEE ERC Consolidator project had two major objectives: First, to study the impact climate change-related stresses on plant genomes, specifically focusing on transposable element (TE) activity. Here, we used a model plant to better understand how TEs may affect gene expression, development, and stress response. We have found that accelerated TE mobilization can change how plants respond to stresses thus lead to the acquisition of important traits, such as drought tolerance.
The second main objective was to directly implement our findings in crop breeding programs. For that, we have tested if controlled stress-induced TE mobilization can be used to breed climate-change ready crops. We focused our research on the two most important crops in the world: rice and wheat. In both crops, TE mobilization has led to phenotypic diversity and modified stress responses showing that it could be a useful tool for crop breeding. This strongly suggests that the methods tested in the frame of this project could be interesting for direct applications.
We then wanted to move on and test these novel traits actual in crop breeding programs, however in 2018 the EU and Switzerland have suddenly prohibited ALL novel crop breeding methods, including the one developed and used here. This meant that we could not perform field trials with wheat to see how our plants perform in a real-world scenario. This was a major unexpected drawback for this project. But we think that this is also an important and unexpected result: As it stands, all novel crop breeding methods invented after 2001 are effectively forbidden, no matter how they work.
The EU’s “precautionary principle” is being applied ad absurdum totally ignoring scientific evidence and advantages of novel technologies.
