On June 22nd the first edition of Translational Research in Crops (TRIC23) kicks off. During this 2 day event, scientists from around the world meet in Ghent to discuss the challenges of producing food in a rapidly changing environment. With the help of groundbreaking research and cutting-edge technologies, researchers try to figure out how plants cope with biotic and abiotic stress, how plant architecture can be improved, how microbes in the soil can be beneficial, and how to grow healthier crops in general.
We asked our plant science Science Communications Expert Steve Bers (Twitter) to highlight a few of these specialists in each session and the research they will present.
Session 1: healthier crops
Cathie Martin from the John Innes Centre (UK) opens the presentation sessions by looking into fortifying the vitamins in tomatoes via genome editing. By editing the gene encoding for the enzyme that synthesizes cholesterol from 7-DHC, Cathie was able to ultimately increase the vitamin D levels in tomatoes. The L-galactose pathway, on the other hand, plays a role in the synthesis of vitamin C, in which GDP-L-galactose phosphorylase (GGP) is the rate-limiting enzyme. Cathie will explain how the removal or reduction of the GGP negative feedback loop has resulted in increased levels of Vitamin C in these plants.
Session 2: Improving crops through plant architecture
In the session on plant architecture, Annis Richardson from the University of Edinburgh (GB) will focus on leaf development in grasses. The shape of a grass leaf underpins its productivity, and the optimal shape can differ depending on the environment and final product. The underlying regulatory networks that define the organ shape of grasses remain largely unknown, making it difficult to know which genes to target for a certain phenotypic outcome. Understanding these regulatory networks in grasses will help to identify target genes for gene editing, making it feasible to generate varieties with optimal leaf shapes precisely matching the plant architecture to the environment and use.
Session 3: Biotic stress in crops
In the final session of the first day, we look more closely at how plants cope with biotic stress. Barbara De Coninck from the KU Leuven (BE) talks about the interaction between the strawberry plant and Botrytis cinerea¸ a fungal pathogen that causes grey mold in crops. The fungus usually infects the flower and remains quiescent in the immature fruit without causing symptoms. Later on, during the development of the mature fruit, it progresses into a symptomatic disease. By using transcriptome and volatilome profiling, Barbara aims to understand how strawberries respond during fruit development and ripening.
Session 4: Abiotic stress in crops
The second day of the conference opens with a focus on abiotic stress. Hilde Nelissen from VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology (BE) will give a presentation on plant organ growth under drought. Organ growth is highly coordinated in time and space, and drought has an impact on this process. The plant will adapt by lowering its growth rate and prolonging the duration of growth. This prolonged window enables plants to quickly resume growth when water becomes available again. By using targeted spatial transcriptomics, Hilde identified several players that affect the duration of growth.
Session 5: beneficial interactions of soil microbiome
Maria Harrison from the Boyce Thompson Institute for plant research (US) will discuss with the audience the interactions between arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and soil bacteria through the development of an extraradical mycelium. Recent 16S rRNA profiling revealed a community of microbes tightly associated with the extraradical mycelium, but the role of this community still needs to be determined. Maria will also have a look at the symbiosis between flowering plants and AM fungi through phylogenomics and functional analysis.
Session 6: Centuries of crop breeding
In the final session, Caixia Gao from the Institute of Genetics and developmental biology (CN) shares her vision of the future of plant breeding. We are facing the challenge of ensuring crop adaptations to droughts and limited nutrients. Our knowledge of how plants deal with and adapt to these challenges is constantly increasing. Plant genome engineering is embarking towards the marriage of improved genome editing tools with this increasing knowledge of plant biology. The use of CRISPR in agriculture should be considered as simply a new breeding method that can produce identical results to conventional methods in a much more predictable, faster, and even cheaper manner.
Would you like to know more?
Then make sure to register for the TRIC23 conference before the final deadline of 8 June!