Program

Plant biologists and breeders face daunting challenges to generate crop varieties tolerant to increasingly extreme and unpredictable environments. Genetic improvement of annual crop plants in these scenarios will be greatly aided by understanding how resource acquisition and use traits integrate. Regulation of many of these traits requires extensive cross-scale and cross organ coordination, ranging from root and shoot architecture to aquaporin functionality. Furthermore, tradeoffs for tolerance to various environmental conditions may limit the utility of a given trait or set of traits, termed an integrated phenotype. Research from rice, common bean and pearl millet, critical food security crops, will be presented to show how multiple beneficial integrated phenotypes can be identified and selected.