Call for Research Ideas: 

International partnership to improve heat and drought adaptation of wheat

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that by 2050, mean temperatures on a global scale may rise by between 2° to 5°C or more, while rainfall and distribution will be less predictable and more extreme. Most of the world’s low-income families live in climate vulnerable regions, namely in Africa and Asia, so climate change represents a major challenge to future food security and farmers’ livelihoods. For these reasons, as part of a new strategy to underpin food security, the Consultative Group on International Agriculture’s (CGIAR) Research Program on Wheat (CRP WHEAT) will establish a multidisciplinary partnership, to capture global expertise and resources, tentatively named the Heat and Drought Wheat Improvement Consortium -HeDWIC-. Development of HeDWIC is being facilitated by The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre -CIMMYT- (the organization that spearheaded the Green Revolution in the 1960s and leads the International Wheat Improvement Network, delivering improved wheat germplasm as an international public good to wheat programs worldwide through extensive partnership) in consultation with an international group of stakeholder organizations, under the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat.

The HeDWIC program under the CRP WHEAT will implement research aiming for food security impact in low- and middle income countries. HeDWIC is fully aligned with how the G-20 Wheat Initiative's developed world members identify shared wheat research priorities, by also functioning as an expert working group on Abiotic Stress under the Wheat Initiative.

In order to launch this initiative and to frame the discussion around the best ideas worldwide in plant stress technology, research ideas are invited for presentation at a conference in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (December 1-4, 2014), at which other stakeholders will be present, including a number of funding organizations that have expressed interest in the HeDWIC initiative. Attendance of researchers whose proposals are selected for presentation will be sponsored.

Applications will be treated with complete confidentiality and should be made by September 2^nd 2014. (Submission deadline was extended for one day due to technical problems that some applicants faced.)

Preamble. While not compulsory, applicants are encouraged to position their research proposal in the context of the below described ‘Research Framework’ that outlines broad approaches for tackling stress adaptation in crops.

Research framework to improve heat and drought adaptation of wheat.

A broad research strategy for improving stress adaptation of wheat is summarized below, under three main components. Components 1 & 2 encompass basic research on major stress adaptive characteristics that are expected to contribute to improved performance under heat and drought stress (based on precedent and theory in published literature). Component 3 represents a series of implementation steps required to harness cutting edge breeding approaches aimed at WHEAT regions.

The choice of Research components and implementation steps should provide either (i) a high likelihood of delivery within the foreseeable future -based on experimental data- or (ii) somewhat higher risk approaches -risky in as much as significant knowledge gaps may exist-, where impacts are expected to be large. The research in HeDWIC will not duplicate work in other areas of the CRP-WHEAT framework, or other ongoing research projects on heat and drought, but will instead link with them to capitalize for example, on outputs from IWYP, Seeds of Discovery, WISP, etc.  To assure coordination with other research projects, HeDWIC will also link with expert groups under the G-20 Wheat Initiative, which aim to better coordinate national members’ wheat R&D priorities and programs. The rationale and a brief scientific outline are presented below:

Component 1: Resource Capture and Utilization Efficiency.

This Program would encompass research on the main plant characteristics that must be genetically optimized to maximize growth potential (i.e. accumulation of plant biomass) under heat or drought stress:

• Root system function and architecture
• Water use efficiency (water budgets & mild dehydration tolerance)
• Thermo-stability of enzymes & membranes
• Oxidative stress and photo-protection
• Respiration
• Canopy development and N dynamics.
• Increasing photosynthetic capacity and efficiency (Linking to International Wheat Yield Partnership)

Component 2: Reproductive Growth and Resource Partitioning

• Ensuring floret fertility
• Understanding stress signalling and whole plant regulation
• Optimizing carbohydrate  partitioning and storage
• End-use quality
• Optimizing structural dry matter partitioning to different organs (Linking to IWYP)
• Local adaptation of reproductive growth (Linking to IWYP)

Component 3: Impact targeting, and strategic deployment of traits and alleles

Component 3 represents the steps of a research and delivery pipeline -underpinned by solid informatics capability- that integrate research in Component 1 and 2 into a breeding, testing, and dissemination pipeline:

• Trait targeting to ensure breeding targets are focused and are complementary to ongoing socio-economic conditions as well as ‘climate smart’ precision agriculture and other crop management initiatives (for example,  the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) and MasAgro Take it to the Farmer (MasAgro TTF), among others)
• Genetic resource exploration (linking to the CRP-Wheat initiative Seeds of Discovery)
• Phenotyping  (linked to the expert working group of the same name under the Wheat Initiative)
• Gene discovery (linked to WISP, Breedwheat, and related gene discovery programs)
• Data management and bioinformatics
• Trait and molecular breeding – transferring new alleles for heat and drought tolerance into elite lines
• International testing 
• Global dissemination of new germplasm and breeding technologies through the International Wheat Improvement Network (IWIN)

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For any enquiries, please contact Petr Kosina (p.kosina@cgiar.org)