Improving barley climate resilience using a candidate gene approach

Rising temperatures brought about by climate change are major threat to agriculture and food security: in wheat and barley, each 1C increase above optimal growth temperature is estimated to reduce yield by 5-6%. A detailed understanding of the mechanisms by which plants respond to high ambient temperature is thus vital to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on crop production.

PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTORs (PIFs) act as a key signalling hub for temperature responses in Arabidopsis (1). In the monocot crops maize and rice, these transcription factors regulate multiple aspects of vegetative and reproductive development and have been harnessed to improve grain size and yield under control conditions and abiotic stresses such as heat and drought (2).

Putative PIF homologues are found in barley, but their relevance for growth and yield remains unknown. Taking advantage of existing transcriptomic datasets (3), we will explore how temperature affects transcription and alternative splicing of these genes and their respective transcripts. Employing transgenic approaches and newest gene editing techniques available through the James Hutton Biotechnology Facility, we will generate knock-out and overexpression lines for selected genes and analyse the consequences for (a) vegetative growth, (b) reproductive development and (c) grain quality and yield under control and stress conditions.

This project will provide fundamental insight into temperature signalling processes in barley and has the clear potential to identify new breeding targets for the generation of "climate-ready" barley varieties.