Overview
Wheat is the cornerstone of global food security, feeding over 2.5 billion people worldwide. However, the rising frequency and intensity of droughts, driven by climate change, threaten its production. This project addresses this critical challenge by leveraging the power of beneficial rhizobacteria to enhance wheat’s resilience to drought. These naturally occurring microbes offer an innovative, sustainable approach to mitigating the adverse impacts of climate stress on agriculture, ensuring food security for future generations.
Why This Matters
Drought stress can lead to staggering yield losses. While crucial, current breeding programs aimed at enhancing drought tolerance have shown limited success in keeping pace with growing climate unpredictability and food demand. Our project focuses on a complementary strategy—harnessing beneficial microbes from wheat’s rhizosphere. These rhizobacteria are known to enhance root architecture, regulate stress-related hormones, and activate plant defense mechanisms, providing a natural avenue for improving drought tolerance.
What We Aim to Achieve
The project's primary goal is to identify, isolate, and characterize rhizobacteria that enhance drought tolerance in wheat. This includes:
Deciphering Microbial Roles in Drought Tolerance: Comprehensive pot studies will explore how rhizobacteria from drought-tolerant and -susceptible wheat genotypes function under drought conditions.
Cultivating and Characterizing Elite Strains: Promising rhizobacteria will undergo genotypic and phenotypic analyses to identify those most effective at supporting wheat under water stress.
Understanding Genetic Mechanisms: Advanced genomic and transcriptomic approaches will reveal how these microbes interact with wheat at the molecular level to improve stress resilience.
