Improving drought resistance in barley using microbiomes

BarleyMicroBreed is a Horizon Europe project that seeks to improve plant resistance to drought by exploiting the interaction between barley and its root microbiome. If the microbiome can increase barley's drought resistance, it could turn out to be one of the ways to increased food security in the future.

BarleyMicroBreed builds on the paradigm that optimized interactions between plant roots and the existing soil microbiota can improve crop plant resource efficiency and drought resilience.

Overall objectives are to

• identify links between barley genome components and root microbiomes that facilitate root phenotypes pivotal for drought resilient barley
• identify novel breeding strategies for crops tailored to harness the benefits of the indigenous soil microbial diversity

The project is a collaboration between Aarhus University (Denmark), Copenhagen University (Denmark), BOKU (Austria), ICARDA (Lebanon), MetasysX (Germany), Photon Systems Instruments (Czech Republic), Eurofins Genomics (Germany) and Lantmannen (Sweden).
 

---