The European Horizon 2020 Accelerated Development of multiple-stress tolerAnt PoTato (ADAPT) project, in which Europatat is participating, aims to develop new strategies to make potatoes adapt to the challenging growing conditions of the future.
“The project has already reached its final phase and in March 2023 researchers will carry out a new round of high-throughput automated phenotyping using two selected varieties. This work will be carried out at the facilities of Photon Systems Instruments in Brno (Czech Republic).”
“Starting from seedlings grown in tissue, the Desirée and Lady Rosetta varieties will be grown in soil under strictly controlled environmental conditions. These two varieties were selected from previous field trials that have been carried out in the consortium over the past two years in Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria. In addition, greenhouse trials conducted at the universities of Erlangen, Utrecht, and Wageningen showed contrasting levels of tolerance to the two different stresses being studied by ADAPT; heat and drought stress, as well as drowning.”
“In the first phase, we improved the experimental setup, for example, regarding the intensity and duration of stress treatments and the best time for sampling. Based on the data obtained so far, we can now analyze in great detail these processes in two contrasting potato varieties and combine automated phenotyping with a detailed analysis of morphological and physiological responses to different stresses. In addition, biochemical and molecular changes in response to simple and combined stresses will also be measured and analyzed at the network level to understand how potato plants acclimate to these stresses and why some varieties perform better than others.”
“To this end, ADAPT researchers will once again take a series of samples at critical times during the experiment, which will then be analyzed using multiple omics approaches. At the Universities of Erlangen and Vienna, ADAPT researchers will track changes in the proteome and metabolome. The plant phytohormones will be measured at Olomouc. Changes in gene expression will be monitored at the National Institute of Biology (nib) in Ljubljana."
“The further integration of all this data will be used to update the stress response models that the NIB team built using previous data and recent ADAPT project results. This dataset is compiled in the stress knowledge map generated by the NIB team as part of the project. This network analysis will help identify critical nodes for acclimatization to multiple stresses, which will then be used for the development of markers for the improvement of more tolerant potato varieties in the future.”
Source: europatat.eu