Improve drought tolerance for sustainable land and agriculture
BOOSTER aims to improve drought tolerance in both maize and teff, while simultaneously exploring the potential for transferring species-specific drought responsive features.
Strategies
- Firstly, a new approach will identify genomic variants in regulatory regions functionally associated with drought tolerance. Novel regulatory elements underlying resilience will inform efficient breeding efforts to create new drought-tolerant cereal varieties.
- Secondly, novel molecular priming technologies from seaweed and microbial-based biostimulants will be developed as an eco-friendly approach for improving drought resilience.
Expected outcomes
By exploiting natural genetic variations to achieve drought-tolerant genotypes, and by developing biostimulants derived from living organisms, BOOSTER will harness the natural resources available to develop new varieties of drought-tolerant agricultural crops.
Timeline: 2023-2027(48 months)
Key industrial partners: EUCORE CONSULTING, APHEA.BIO, BIOATLANTIS, KWS SAAT SE & Co KGaA, ID Consortium
Program: European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme – grant agreement No. 101081770
