Lecture from John Clifton-Brown from the Univerity of Giessen

“Lecture from John Clifton-Brown from the Univerity of Giessen” on May 10th at 09:00

John Clifton-Brown will talk about his many years of work with Miscanthus

Conventional hybrid breeding of C4 perennial Miscanthus produces rare-recombinant hybrids which use dynamic stomatal control to combine both high yield and high drought tolerance.

Abstract:

Climate change induced weather extremes include more frequent and more prolonged droughts and floods, and require a wide range of resilience traits. Perennials with C4 photosynthesis have higher water and nitrogen use efficiencies than annual C3 crops. We believe if these integrated with site specific spatial arrangements into the farming landscape, these have the potential to provide a range of important ecosystem services whilst providing biomass to expand the bioeconomy. Miscanthus, a perennial C4 from Eastern Asia, occurs over a very wide geographic and climatic range. Over 17 years we collected, characterized, mass crossed and selected promising hybrids adapted to European climatic conditions. Phenotypic selection in multi-environment field trials have shown combined high resilience and high yield in some ‘rare recombinants’. Investigations into the physiological traits indicate the importance of dynamic stomatal control, but analyses of root dynamics to date are limited. We use model parameters derived from temporal field measurements to explore variations and to model yield potential across Europe under current and future climates.