A cereal crop survives heat and drought

For the purpose of sustainable research, breeding and protecting genetic diversity especially of crop plants many public non-profit research organization have formed under the umbrella of CGIAR and are active in research and building non-profit biobanks. ICRISAT is the Indian pendant of the famous CIMMYT which started in the 60ies to distribute disease resistant wheat varieties under the poor farmers in the developing countries.

Pearl millet (Cenchrus americanus 72 (L.) Morrone synonymous for Pennisetum glaucum) is a staple food plant in arid and semi-arid regions of Africa, India and Asia. This so-called C4 plant shows high resistance against drought stress but molecular mechanisms behind this are rather unknown. "The first steps to elucidate molecular mechanisms in any organism from plants to animals to microbes is to sequence and analyze their genome, proteome and metabolome," says the systems biologist Wolfram Weckwerth, head of the Department of Ecogenomics and Systems Biology and Chair of the Vienna Metabolomics Center of the University of Vienna. An international consortium with participation of the University of Vienna sequenced now the genome of pearl millet and additionally 994 further breeding lines and wildtypes to reveal molecular properties hinting to drought resistance mechanisms on a genome basis. "Furthermore this study provides the basis for marker-selected breeding studies," says the coordinator of the genome project Rajeev Varshney.

In a related study Arindam Ghatak, Palak Chaturvedi, Wolfram Weckwerth and further team members investigated the drought resistance of pearl millet with respect to metabolism and proteome changes. From these studies the first molecular-physiological hypotheses are derived how the plant can adapt to water deficiency and heat and at the same time keep a reasonable harvest index. The initial genomic information of pearl millet was essential for these studies.