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

全球气候变化不仅会导致全球平均气温升高，而且会导致降水系统的变化。在加拿大，这在大草原地区尤其重要，因为大草原地区是加拿大农业的主要贡献地区。这将导致包括小麦在内的许多主要作物减产。尽管小麦育种可以提高对干旱胁迫的抵抗力和恢复力，但气候变化的速度和规模要求创新的生物技术方法来完成这项任务。幸运的是，近年来概念和技术上的进步使得设计新策略帮助小麦快速适应干旱条件成为可能。这些策略利用了小麦和其微生物群（统称为全生生物）之间的密切相互作用。该项目分为两个互补的部分：1）了解干旱对全生生物的影响，2）操纵全生生物以更好地抵抗干旱胁迫。通过更好地了解全生生物内部发生的相互作用，我们希望能够设计出新的策略来适应小麦植物的胁迫条件。这些策略包括优化holobiont的微生物部分，使holobiont预适应压力条件，并将holobiontevolution引向所需的高弹性状态。这些策略被认为可以在一代或几代人的时间内实现，为即将到来的降水不平衡问题提供迫切需要的解决方案，并可能取消预测的作物产量损失。

Global climatic change will not only result in higher mean temperature, but also to changes in precipitationregimes. In Canada, this will be particularly important in the Prairies, the major contributing region toCanadian agriculture. This will lead to reduced yields in many major crops, including wheat. Although wheatbreeding could improve resistance and resilience to drought stress, the rapidity and the scale of climate changeis calling for innovative biotechnological methods for that task. Fortunately, there have been conceptual andtechnological advances in recent years that now allows devising novel strategies to help wheat rapidly adapt todrier conditions. These strategies take advantage of the intimate interactions between the wheat and itsmicrobiota (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 todevise novel strategies to adapt wheat plants to stressful conditions. Such strategies involve optimizing themicrobial part of the holobiont, pre-adapting the holobiont to stressful conditions and directing holobiontevolution toward desired highly resilient states. These strategies are thought to be achievable within a single ora few generations, providing direly needed solutions to upcoming precipitation imbalance issues, andpotentially cancelling predicted crop yield losses.