“To sustainably meet food demands, we need to increase cereal grain yields without using more land and water, all the while facing accelerating climate change. Our research will learn how features on the outer layer or epidermis of cereal plants can help improve crops”
07 November2023, UK: The James Hutton Institute, University of Dundee and collaborators have been awarded £1.165M from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to study a feature of cereal plants that can help improve crops.
Alongside Dr Chiara Campoli and Dr Runxuan Zhang from the James Hutton Institute, the partners on the project include Professor Tracy Lawson from the University of Essex and Dr James Cockram from the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. The project will run for three years.
Dr Sarah McKim, a Principal Investigator in the Division of Plant Sciences based at the University of Dundee said, “To sustainably meet food demands, we need to increase cereal grain yields without using more land and water, all the while facing accelerating climate change. Our research will learn how features on the outer layer or epidermis of cereal plants can help improve crops.”
“The epidermis has a waxy coating to prevent water loss and reflect sunlight, and many different types of cells, such as adjustable gas pores and hairs, which control how plants interact with the atmosphere.”
“We will use cutting edge approaches to understand the epidermis at unprecedented resolution and learn more about the genes which control these features and how these features combine to impact cereal performance under different climates. Taken together, our research will deliver a step-change in our ability to engineer epidermal features to future-proof our crops.”
