Descripción del proyecto
Edición del genoma y mejora genética rápida para un mayor rendimiento de los cultivos
La tasa de mejora genética actual de las nuevas variedades de cultivos agrícolas es demasiado baja para abordar las amenazas futuras a la seguridad alimentaria. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos BREEDIT introducirá una estrategia innovadora de mejora genética para evaluar con rapidez combinaciones de posibles alelos (una de dos o más versiones de un gen) que contribuyan al rendimiento. Evaluará el efecto combinatorio de las mutaciones editadas del genoma en el crecimiento y el rendimiento de las plantas. Para ello, introducirá plantas con diferentes mezclas de mutaciones editadas del genoma en más de ochenta genes conocidos relacionados con el rendimiento en un enfoque de cruzamiento. El proyecto sentará las bases para desarrollar estrategias de mejora genética a medida que utilice las mejores combinaciones posibles de alelos beneficiosos.
Objetivo
Feeding the growing world population under changing climate conditions poses an unprecedented challenge on global agriculture and our current pace to breed new high yielding crop varieties is too low to face the imminent threats on food security. This ERC project proposes a novel crossing scheme that allows for an expeditious evaluation of combinations of potential yield contributing alleles by unifying ‘classical’ breeding with gene-centric molecular biology. The acronym BREEDIT, a word fusion of breeding and editing, reflects the basic concept of combining breeding with multiplex genome editing of yield related genes. By introducing plants with distinct combinations of genome edited mutations in more than 80 known yield related genes into a crossing scheme, the combinatorial effect of these mutations on plant growth and yield will be evaluated. Subsequent rounds of crossings will increase the number of stacked gene-edits per plant, thus increasing the combinatorial complexity. Phenotypic evaluations throughout plant development will be done on our in-house automated image-analysis based phenotyping platform. The nature and frequency of Cas9-mediated mutations in the entire plant collection will be characterised by multiplex amplicon sequencing to follow the efficiency of CRISPR-cas9 genome editing and to identify the underlying combinations of genes that cause beneficial phenotypes (genetic gain). The obtained knowledge on yield regulatory networks can be directly implemented into current molecular breeding programs and the project will provide the basis to develop targeted breeding schemes implementing the optimal combinations of beneficial alleles into elite material.
BREEDIT will be a major step forward in integrating basic knowledge on genes with plant breeding and has the potential to provoke a paradigm shift in improving crop yield.
Ámbito científico
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologygenetic engineeringgene therapy
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsmutation
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagricultureagronomyplant breeding
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsgenomes
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmolecular biology
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitución de acogida
9052 ZWIJNAARDE - GENT
Bélgica