COPE-50 · Global Climate change impact on phenOtype and ePigenomE stability: Accessing plant adaptability through a 2050 simulation model
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-06-01 → 2019-05-31
- EU contribution
- €160,301
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Global Climate change impact on phenOtype and ePigenomE stability: Accessing plant adaptability through a 2050 simulation model
Maintaining agricultural productivity and sustainability under various climate change scenarios is critical for food security, worldwide. Existing climate simulation models forecast a shift towards the combination of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, warming climate and inconsistent precipitation regimes. A direct effect of the predicted climatic changes could be the alterations in crop physiology, growth, and productivity. These changes may negatively affect the livelihood of farming communities, resulting in decreased life quality and longevity linked to climate change, especially in developing countries. Hence, there is an urgent need to design new strategies to address this impending challenge. One of the key steps is to experimentally examine how the predicted climate will affect the performance of plants under controlled laboratory conditions. Hence, the main objective of the project COPE-50 was to evaluate the combined effects of future climatic constraints on the experimental model plant Arabidopsis and to develop a framework to assess the phenotypic performance and to identify the underlying molecular mechanisms. Overall, we found that changes in climate variables will lead to changes in plant physiology and phenology in a location-specific manner.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
One of the key challenges in the 21st century will be food security. Computer modelling using historical data predicts a climate shift towards combination of increasing temperature, rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and high Ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Such climatic change could negatively affect productivity of the agricultural systems and thus availability of food for the growing world’s population, which is a very serious concern. However, most of the current debate is based on little experimental evidence. Therefore, we aim to address this question by establishing a strong backbone of phenotypic and molecular data in the frame of the proposed project. Our first objective will be to examine the impact of the predicted 2050 climate on the morphological and physiological performance of the model and the crop plants. Adaptation of plants to environmental cues occurs also at the gene transcriptional level and is widely controlled by epigenetic means. Therefore, in the second objective we will study plant chromatin changes in response to predicted climatic change and their effects on plant phenotypes. Our study will act as a resource to framework the phenotypic and molecular mechanism by which these environmental variations affect crop yields and current estimates of future impacts of climate. Hence, the longer term goal of the project is to contribute towards solving the current food security issues by providing valuable resource of data for scientists along with the strategy makers.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/747718
- https://olomouc.ueb.cas.cz/en/research/projects/global-climate-change-impact-on-phenotype-and-epig
Data: CORDIS, © European Union