Novel holobiont-based approaches to rapidly adapt wheat to drought stress

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Global climatic change will not only result in higher mean temperature, but also to changes in precipitation**regimes. In Canada, this will be particularly important in the Prairies, the major contributing region to**Canadian agriculture. This will lead to reduced yields in many major crops, including wheat. Although wheat**breeding could improve resistance and resilience to drought stress, the rapidity and the scale of climate change**is calling for innovative biotechnological methods for that task. Fortunately, there have been conceptual and**technological advances in recent years that now allows devising novel strategies to help wheat rapidly adapt to**drier conditions. These strategies take advantage of the intimate interactions between the wheat and its**microbiota (collectively termed the holobiont). The proposed project is divided in two complementary parts: 1)**understanding the effects of drought on the holobiont, 2) manipulating holobionts to better resist drought stress.**By better understanding the entirety of the interactions occurring within this holobiont, we expect to be able to**devise novel strategies to adapt wheat plants to stressful conditions. Such strategies involve optimizing the**microbial part of the holobiont, pre-adapting the holobiont to stressful conditions and directing holobiont**evolution toward desired highly resilient states. These strategies are thought to be achievable within a single or**a few generations, providing direly needed solutions to upcoming precipitation imbalance issues, and**potentially cancelling predicted crop yield losses.