CROPINNO – Introducing multi-omics tools for improved crop stress resilience

Agriculture is one of the “victims” of climate change and one of the most severely affected sectors. It has become evident that as the climate changes, crop production strategies must change as well, including primarily adaptations through breeding and crop management. In the future, it is expected that integrative approaches that combine -omics technologies by using bioinformatic tools will facilitate the identification of target genes and markers for complex traits and facilitate crop adaptation to the changing environment. Within its activities, Twinning project CROPINNO will implement at and validate different phenotyping and multi-omics tools in breeding for improved stress resilience. Sunflower is chosen as a model crop for validation of different tools and approaches since it is considered as potential model crop for adaptation to a changing environment. Activities within CROPINNO are aimed at: i) pre-screening sunflower genotypes from IFVCNS collection using for biotic and abiotic stress resilience using different phenotyping methods; ii) study of effects of drought on sunflower plants at chromatin and transcriptional level; iii) performing whole genome SNP analysis in order to develop SNP-based markers for drought stress resilience; iv) performing integrated data analysis and comparative bioinformatics for drought responses in order to unveil possible direct correlations between stress-induced genes transcriptional variation and histone modification levels and design of networks of candidate genes for sunflower drought tolerance. Models, tools and know-how developed on sunflower will be transferred and implemented in the breeding programs of other main field crops at IFVCNS and Western Balkans region.