Optimizing carbon use for yield in drought-stressed storage organ crops – in potato and onion
Goals
How do potatoes and onions cope with environmental stress? This team aims to obtain insights into the effects of drought and nitrogen-limiting conditions. Potatoes and onions are grown for their storage organs; tubers and bulbs. The plants distribute energy from photosynthetic leaves and nutrients from the roots to these storage organs. When a plant experiences environmental stress, it has less energy and nutrients available for growth. Plants then need to prioritise how to use these resources. The team investigates the physiological and molecular changes that are needed in potato to adapt to drought stress and nitrogen limitation, and to drought stress in onion. It aims to identify key regulators of nitrogen use and partitioning of carbon and nutrients to the storage organs under these stress conditions.
Approach
The team monitors a wide array of morphological and physiological characteristics of the plants (phenotyping) to understand how the crops adapt to drought and limited nitrogen availability. Additional biochemical and molecular analyses will help to identify the physiological parameters and the underlying molecular mechanisms that contribute to drought tolerance and efficient use of nitrogen. The close collaboration with potato and onion breeders ensures that the outcome of these studies will support the production of climate-smart varieties of potato and onion that maintain high yields under challenging growth conditions.
Activities
The team executes various experiments under (semi) controlled conditions. Furthermore, it acquires a large phenotyping dataset comprising measurements targeting morphological adaptations, photosynthetic response, nutrient assimilation and carbon partitioning mechanisms and water management strategies. The combined analysis with biochemical and molecular data will give insight in how these traits contribute to optimising yield under adverse conditions. Moreover, genetic variation for these traits will be identified. The data and knowledge will fuel models that support strategies to maximize yield in potato and onion.
Photo left: Potato plant. Photo right: PhD candidate Jenske Aben sampling potato plants.
Related content
Portrait Jenske Aben
Team
Work package leader Gerard van der Linden, Researcher Abiotic Stress, WUR
Francisco Pinto Espinosa, Assistant Professor, WUR
Jenske Aben, PhD candidate, WUR
Jochem Evers, Professor Crop Physiology, WUR
Kirsten ten Tusscher, Professor of Computational Developmental Biology, UU
Lucia Perez Borroto, Researcher Abiotic Stress and Phenotyping, WUR
Marcello Gazale, PhD candidate, WUR
Niels Anten, Professor Crop & Weed Ecology, WUR
Rashmi Sasidharan, Professor of Plant Stress Resilience, UU