With increasing urbanization and climate change it is predicted that there will be a global crisis in the future agricultural systems by 2050 due to the increase in demand for staple food crops. To reduce the gap between the food supply and demand, sustainable agriculture and food security is one of the targeted priorities. Over the past decade’s improvement strategies are focused on staple crops like wheat, rice and maize. But this will not be an effective solution to meet the future requirements of the growing global population where different parts of the world have different growing conditions and needs. Considering this, one strategy to alleviate these pressures is through the diversification of minor or "orphan crops”. These crops have the advantages that they are nutritious and are more responsive to a rapidly changing environment with more productivity but often they have received less attention from the research community.
Major calorie consumption of human diet comes from the cereals and of the many edible cereals there are a category of niche crops (millets and Teff), where they have been exploited only for their nutritional benefits and is being gaining demand as functional foods in the Western countries at the same time there is a need to tackle the malnutrition in Africa and Asia by improving their staple food crops.
This current project targets an emerging Ethiopian cereal, Teff that has received less research attention. Teff is a tiny-seeded Ethiopian crop and serve as a staple food for over 50 million people in the Horn of Africa. It is recently gaining prominence in the food market because of its gluten-free nature and high-levels of proteins, minerals (iron and calcium), flavonoids (antioxidants) vitamins and slow-digestible starch and is an alternative for people suffering from gluten intolerance and type 2 diabetes. Tef is found to thrive in a wide range of environmental conditions such as drought and water logging. Despite its nutritional and resilience nature, tef has lower yield due to lack of sustained research and development efforts that limits its contribution towards global food and nutrition security.
The characteristics of teff make it an excellent candidate for bio-fortification and crop improvement and to further develop this under-utilized/studied species as a sustainable crop for research led agricultural growth. Overall aim of SUPERTEFF project is to augment the value of this neglected crop into a 'super grain' by applying various high-throughput omics approaches. This involves the novel application of phenomics and metabolomics based studies followed by the implementation of the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) system in exploring the potential of this crop for human food and animal feed. Taking this forward, for the first time, a large collection of teff varieties will be screened using wide range of genome and metabolite approaches.The proposed study will identify elite teff lines with better yield and nutritional quality which will further help the Ethiopian farmers and breeders in their tef breeding and improvement programmes.
