Understanding of Plant Adaptation to Different Environment Conditions

Bing CHENG

Abstract:

Climate change is threatening many agricultural regions around the globe. Plants are sessile organisms and migrate to more prosperous habitat. How do they approach this is an open question in plant science. This presentation will cover our recent studies exploiting plant phenotypic and genomic information, to demonstrate how their deployment can help agriculture withstands climate change responsibly and sustainably. Results from these studies will provide insights into the genetic adaptation of plants in a wider range of available future environments.

Short Bio:

In 2019, Bing gained her PhD degree from The University of Queensland, Australia under the supervision of Prof. R. Henry. She focused on the genetic improvement of coffee quality through comparative genomics and transcriptomics. She has published the first long-read reference transcriptome for Arabica coffee bean and identified candidate genes regulating essential chemical accumulation during bean ripening. Currently, Bing Cheng is a postdoctoral fellow from the Crop Production and Biostimulation Laboratory (CPBL) at the Interfaculatry School of Bioengineers, ULB, under the guidance of Prof C. Hermans. She is exploiting the natural variability of the model (Arabidopsis) and crop (oilseed rape) species to decipher genetic bases of resource use efficiency, using genome-wide association studies and global transcriptome analysis.

About CPBL:

The Crop Nutrition unit at CPBL focuses on improving resource use efficiency of crops to ensure food security and environmental quality. A considerable fraction of fertilizer to sustain plant biomass production gets lost as runoffs with detrimental consequences to the environment and human health. Faced with those pressing societal costs, modern agriculture must make a step change to produce biomass with less input. The unit develops synergistic activities in the laboratory, natural habitat and field environments to identify plant characteristics for improving the resilience of agricultural production.

The core research theme developed at CPBL is on the environmentally sustainable intensification of the agricultural system. Research developed by the host group is interdisciplinary and aims at (i) identifying crop characteristics for improving resilience of agricultural production while limiting the environmental footprint, (ii) providing breeders with selection criteria (including molecular and genomic tools) to develop new crop varieties, (iii) developing and evaluating methods (in lab and field environments) for performance testing of these varieties.