Preece Lab

Research focus

ERC Consolidator Grant · 2023

From wild to crop: unravelling the impact of root domestication on drought tolerance

Crop domestication revolutionised human life. This process induced changes in plant traits that produced plants that grew faster and generated higher yields. However, remarkably little is known about how plant roots have changed throughout the domestication process. Climate change is causing increasing droughts in many parts of the world. Given that roots are the way that water enters the plant, they are key for understanding drought tolerance. Root traits from crop ancestors could offer a route to increasing drought tolerance of modern crops. To do this, we need to focus our efforts on the impact of domestication on roots and the rhizosphere (the zone around the root including microbes),…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.