Building Resilience to Climate Change: Enhancing Biodiversity in Annual and Perennial Crops with Nuclear Innovations

Climate change disrupts global food crop production by altering weather patterns, reducing yields, and increasing the prevalence of pests, diseases and weeds, thereby exacerbating food insecurity.
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Vegetatively propagated crops (VPCs), annuals such as cassava and taro; and perennials such as fruit tree crops, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change due to their genetic uniformity, making them highly susceptible to disease outbreaks and stresses such as water scarcity, temperature-induced productivity loss, with negative effects on crop nutritional quality. Investing in research and breeding programs to develop and promote a wider array of crop species and varieties that possess inherent resilience to climate change stresses is crucial.
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This CRP project will focus on developing key technologies for crop improvement of vegetatively propagated crops including nuclear-based induced genetic diversity (using radiation to create mutations and expand variability), effective micropropagation methods, rapid generation advance (RGA) to accelerate breeding cycles, advanced phenotyping and genotyping tools to identify superior mutant lines with enhanced tolerance/resistance to abiotic stresses and herbicides, as well as improved nutritional quality.