STRESSLESS · Enhancing plant stress tolerance from the inside-out

Our climate is changing, the world population is still growing and our planet has finite resources; these are well-known facts. Developing improved crop varieties is crucial to ensure that our agriculture is well-prepared for increased environmental stress, can maintain high yields and utilises less resources such as fertiliser or available land. One key aspect is to prepare our crops for abiotic stresses such as saline soils and drought, two factors which are rapidly increasing world-wide, including the EU. Many abiotic stress-tolerance mechanisms have been described through lab-based studies, yet they are notoriously difficult to translate into field grown crops. Therefore, the here proposed project, STRESSLESS, will tackle this issue by taking a different approach. STRESSLESS is primarily based on observations in the crop soybean (Glycine max), with additional observations made in rice (Oryza sativa), and aims to identify the cellular mechanism contributing to improved plant growth, going from crop-observed phenotypes to in-depth analysis in the model plant Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) instead of vice versa. Ultimately, STRESSLESS aims to contribute to preparing our crop plants for a sustainable, yet still profitable future agriculture.