The 3-years European project MineLandDiv headed by Stéphane Nicolas from the GQMS team has been launched This month!
** This SusCrop-Era-Net project gathers 8 European partners from 5 countries. In france, it includes 3 INRAE research teams: EPGV, AGAP, [GQE-Le Moulon (https://moulon.inrae.fr/equipes/gqms/) and 2 experimental stations (DIASCOPE et l’Unité Expérimentale du maïs - Saint Martin de Hinx. This project is based on the observation that climate change, soil degradation and fertilizer costs threaten food security and agriculture sustainability in Europe. In this context traditional varieties of crops or landraces are a valuable source of genetic diversity for addressing these challenges.**
Landraces have been selected for adaptation to local agro-climatic conditions and human uses and could therefore carry favorable alleles for tolerance to abiotic or biotic stresses. However, landraces remain underutilized in modern breeding programs and agriculture because they are poorly characterized, genetically heterogeneous and exhibit limited agronomic performance compared to elite material. Great effort has been recently made to characterize the genotypic variation of thousands of maize landraces but few resources have been mobilized for analyzing their phenotypic variation and genetic diversity for complex traits as tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses. The project MineLandDiv (Mining Allelic Diversity in Landraces for Tolerance to Abiotic and Biotic stress) proposes to fill this gap by combining different up-to-date genomic approaches, genetic and statistical methods with high throughput phenotyping tools including sensors / metagenomics for fine environmental characterization. MineLandDiv aims at (i) identifying maize landraces and favorable alleles for tolerance to abiotic (heat/drought - cold - nitrogen) and biotic stresses (Corn borer) that could be used to broaden genetic diversity of modern breeding germplasms and (ii) better understanding their resilience to variable environmental conditions.