Research proposal grant for Martijn van Zanten and Rashmi Sasidharan

Dr. Rashmi Sasidharan (Plant Ecophysiology) and Dr. Martijn van Zanten (Molecular Plant Physiology) have received a grant for a project as part of the NWO/DBT programme ‘Crops Sciences: Improved Tolerance to Heat and Drought”. The project will be conducted in cooperation with colleagues from Wageningen University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Delhi University. The goal is to determine the mechanisms by which the important food crop, rice, and the model plant Arabidopsis can adapt to a period of drought after floods, and to a period of drought combined with high temperature.

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent floods, as well as longer warm and dry periods. These environmental conditions severely affect crop productivity and yield. However, plants can acclimate themselves to minimize the damaging effects of high temperatures and drought. With this project, the researchers will focus on the strategies that rice and the model plant Arabidopsis use to tolerate multiple stress combinations.

Climate change-ready crops

Two PhDs and two post-docs will work on the project titled “Understanding responses to simultaneously and sequentially occurring abiotic stresses typical of climate change in rice and Arabidopsis”. They will investigate the mechanistic basis of tolerance to multiple stresses that occur simultaneously (high temperature and drought) and sequentially (drought following flooding). They will identify and study relevant plant traits, genes and molecular processes that mediate tolerance to these stresses in the crop plant rice and the model plant Arabidopsis. This knowledge will eventually facilitate development of multi-stress-tolerant crops that can yield well in a changing climate.