description
- Significant improvements in crop yields are urgently required to meet the increase in world population by 2050. The ability of a crop to efficiently absorb water and nutrients relies on its root system to fully explore the available soil. However, soil can become too hard for roots to penetrate. This is referred to as soil compaction and represents a major challenge facing modern agriculture due to changes in how fields are managed and increasing weight of modern farming equipment. If crop roots are unable to penetrate soil due to compaction, this results in reduced yields of 25%, and up to 75% when combined with drought stress. Over half of Europe's farmed soil are prone to compaction, costing billions of pounds of losses. Despite its importance, little was known about why roots actually stop growing in hard soils. A series of (literally) ground-breaking experiments by our team (Pandey et al, 2021, Science) recently revealed that roots are able to penetrate highly compacted soil after disrupting their sensitivity to a plant hormone signal called ethylene. The BREAKTHRU project proposes to exploit this new knowledge and re-engineer wheat to become resistant to hard soils by modifying their root responses to the signal ethylene. We will identify new wheat varieties whose roots are less sensitive to ethylene. Advanced imaging and artificial intelligence approaches will then be used to test whether the new wheat varieties we have selected are better able to grow in compacted soil and capture nutrients and water more readily. Finally, we will grow the most promising wheat lines in realistic field conditions including when soil has been compacted by farm machinery. The knowledge gained from this study will provide vital new information about the key genes controlling root responses to soil compaction, helping breeders to design novel approaches to overcome soil compaction and enhance resource capture and yield in crops supporting efforts to improve food security in the UK.