Short project description

The majority of humanity’s food calories are derived from annual grains, which require re-planting for each harvest. This results in regular disturbance of the soil and fallow periods between annual crops, both of which pose major challenges for soil health. In a radical new imagining of agricultural systems, researchers have bred perennial versions of our most common annual grains.

One of these perennial grains, perennial cereal rye, has shown promising yields in Denmark. Rye has long been valued for its natural weed suppression via the release of allelopathic compounds, which inhibit the successful germination of weed seeds in the soil. It is unknown whether the perennial cereal rye will offer the same favourable weed suppressive abilities (or better) compared to annual rye.

This greenhouse- and lab-based project will complement a larger field-based study investigating weed dynamics in perennial and annual cereal rye cropping systems. The project will compare the timing, amount, and identity of allelopathic compounds released by annual cereal rye and a new variety of perennial cereal rye. The plants will be grown in a greenhouse setting, and compounds will be analysed using a state-of-the-art high-performance liquid chromatography- mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS).

This project will support student learning about ecologically-based weed control, natural plant-produced compounds, greenhouse-based experiments and HPLC-MS analyses. It is expected that the analyses from this project will result in a peer-reviewed paper.