Unlocking the properties of pre-Green Revolution rice with focus on nitrogen economy

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Crop plants evolve under the pressure of human needs and agricultural practices, hence contemporary varieties can be very different from those cultivated a century ago. In 1967, the Green Revolution invoked one of the most radical changes to crops and their cultivation environment. It encompassed mechanisation, the introduction of agro-chemicals, irrigation, and the replacement of traditional landraces with high-yielding hybrid monoculture. While it is credited with saving around one billion lives from starvation in developing countries, it implemented high chemical-input unsustainable agriculture, which affected crops, their environment, their associated microbiomes, and our dietary habits. Due to the high pace of rice agriculture transformation in Asia, we have very limited knowledge about the past genetic diversity, symbiotic relationships, and nutritional qualities of rice. In particular, we know very little about rice interactions with microbes, which are frequently suggested as sustainable alternatives to chemical inputs. To better understand the chemical-independent agriculture of the past, and to unlock rice properties that could improve sustainable nitrogen uptake, I propose to characterize the genomic, metagenomic and chemical diversity of historical populations of rice in Southeast Asia that predate the Green Revolution. Tailoring multi-omic approaches to degraded historical plants is not trivial. This project will utilize state-of-art methodology for archaeogenomics, pioneer analyses of nutrients in historical samples, and employ new methods for accurate microbiome characterization. I will conduct field experiments to test the effects of pre-Green Revolution microbial mixtures on rice nitrogen economy. In sum, this project will spearhead the mining of historical crop collections to unlock lost properties of crops through multi-omics. It will inspire the search for lost biotic and abiotic resistance traits with promise to increase our future food security.