Understanding root architecture to improve crop resilience

Exploiting the anatomical traits of stress-tolerant crops to accelerate breeding.

Lead researcher: Dr Rahul Bhosale

Improving crop yield and climate resilience in cereal crops is incredibly important to global crop production. Yields are affected by droughts (increasingly unpredictable due to climate change) and poor soil quality. Understanding the role of the root in yield and resilience is important and this can be done by identifying anatomical traits in roots.

This project identifies aerenchyma (air spaces that form in the root) using an ‘anatomics’ approach in order to understand how such traits confer stress tolerance in maize and pearl millet.

This project is funded by BBSRC.