Abstract
In the light of population growth, making food production more efficient is of strategic importance. The land available for crops cannot be further expanded, so the key to solving the problem is to develop plant cultivars with good adaptability and high, stable yield potential, and to elaborate production technologies that serve to improve efficiency. The number of extreme weather events and their intensity has been proved to be increasing, thus endangering crop safety. Improvements in plannability and predictability in the agricultural sector are therefore of vital significance both from the strategic point of view and for the national economy. An increase in the sustainability of field crop production is given high priority in the European Union. The effect of the restrictions stipulated in EU Directives can only be overcome by substantial innovation in agriculture. Developments in plant breeding based on conventional technologies are gradually slowing down, suggesting that the yield potential of modern cultivars is approaching the maximum level achievable given their biological, physical and genetic background. Nowadays the market for cereals is characterised by continual changes aimed at satisfying current demands, trends, and consumer habits and ‘fads’. Rapid, efficient alterations in the choice of cultivars available can only be achieved with the incorporation of research methods based on molecular genetics and genomics. The basic research programmes in this project are aimed at clarifying the reproduction biology, physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology background of tolerance to the abiotic and biotic stress factors that represent a real risk. The aim of the maize and cereal breeding programmes, which have practical input and are market-, farmer- and consumer-oriented, is to exploit the available biological resources to develop new plant cultivars and hybrids that can be successfully cultivated under the very variable and frequently extreme agro-ecological and meteorological conditions in the Carpathian Basin. Research related to technological quality and human health is conducted not only on wheat, but also on other species such as durum wheat, which has high lutein content, barley and oat genotypes that serve as a valuable source of β-glucan, and cultivars and lines of spelt, emmer and einkorn. Special attention is now given to research on raw materials for the production of gluten-free foodstuffs. In Hungary, crop production data indicate that farmers only exploit half the potential yielding ability of the cultivars, so one main aim of the project is to elaborate an extension service capable of preparing recommendations for a field- and cultivar-specific technologies that take into consideration the desired end-use and the resources available, which would enable the input side of crop production to be optimised, thus improving cost-effectiveness and minimising negative environmental effects. The aim of breeding cereals and maize hybrids with good adaptability, suitable for cultivation in organic farm systems, will be achieved by integrating innovative methods into the pre-breeding and breeding processes. SNP chip-based markers and bioinformatic methods will be applied to identify genetic diversity and gene variants responsible for favourable traits. As regards methodological improvements in selection efficiency, it is aimed to introduce genomic selection into plant breeding practice, to develop doubled haploid populations from targeted crosses performed based on genetic information, and to elaborate a high-throughput in-house diagnostic marker selection technique for genes that enhance abiotic stress tolerance. Pre-breeding research will be aimed at pinpointing the physiological and biochemical processes responsible for heat and drought tolerance, at mapping QTL regions related to the heat, drought and leaf rust resistance of Aegilops genotypes and designing relevant gene-based PCR markers, and finally at using these markers to develop wheat-Aegilops introgression lines carrying chromosome segments and unique gene variants responsible for stress tolerance. The effects of abiotic and biotic stress factors important for breeding will be analysed at the metabolomics level. A genome editing technology will be elaborated to improve recombination ability and to promote the more efficient combination of traits determined by genes located in the central region of the chromosome arms, close to the centromere. The results of the basic research module of the project will be summarised in publications in leading scientific journals, while those of the plant breeding module will take the form of applications for plant variety rights for new cultivars and hybrids. The newly developed data warehouse and the results of crop production trials carried out in the modern experimental systems will be directly utilised in crop production as a new module in the integrated extension system.
Hungary