UC Davis researchers in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and College of Engineering are using plant genetics, artificial intelligence, and three-dimensional (3D) modeling to develop new varieties of crops that will be able to withstand future climates.
GEMINI stands for GxExM Innovation in Intelligence for climate adaptation. The acronym GxExM is a common abbreviation in agricultural science that relates plants’ features as a function of genotype, environment, and management. The team is focusing on three major crops grown and consumed in various African countries: common beans, black-eyed peas, also known as cowpeas, and sorghum. The team hopes that with the help of this new technology, they will be able to predict the effects of future and ongoing changes in climate and then develop varieties that will be best suited to grow in those conditions. To do this, three researchers are utilizing their different strengths to tackle this issue.
Christine Diepenbrock, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis, has a lab that focuses on abiotic stress tolerance and improving the nutritional quality of crops through understanding crops’ genetics and genomics. Abiotic stresses are nonliving conditions like drought and high temperatures that may reduce a plant’s function. These are the types of stresses that the GEMINI project aims to address, especially as the world’s changing climate puts new and evolving stresses on agriculture.
“I am on what we call the pre-breeding and genetics side of the project, where we are working with breeding partners in West and East Africa,” Diepenbrock said. “We are partnering with breeders in Senegal, Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania on ways to further inform and improve the sorghum and grain legume, namely the common bean and cowpea breeding pipelines.”
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