Climate change and its effects on crop improvement strategies

Global warming is predicted to lead to increases in mean global temperatures between 0.3 to 4.8oC during the 21st century. These incremental changes will have a significant effect on Food and nutritional security. Yield and quality of our staple foods will be adversely affected. 

Aim. Determine how robust traditional and emerging Plant Breeding Techniques (crop improvement) are to climatic fluctuations? Our climatic variable will be elevated environmental temperature, metabolomics will be used to assess potential new environmental and health hazards resulting from the different approaches to crop improvement used.

Objective 1. Use existing climate data to model the predicted changes in temperature in the selected regions (e.g., potentially Southern and Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East over the next decade). 
Objective 2. Use tomato as a model crop and create a panel consisting of (i) traditionally breed lines containing diverse genetic regions from wild relatives, (ii) genotypes with similar traits but developed using genetic modification, and (iii) identified heat tolerant genotypes. 
Objective 3. Cultivation of the tomato genotypes at elevated temperatures (e.g., up to 40 degrees C) and apply metabolomics to capture compositional changes and identify potential hazards.
Objective 4. Data integration to predict how chemical composition in food crops could be altered by climate change and how different Plant Breeding Techniques could mitigate perturbations.