Species’ adaptations involve the change in their genetic make-up as a result of both selection and stochastic processes. The ability of plants to cope with different environments depends on the range of genetic and epigenetic diversity in populations, which relate to plastic and constitutive mechanisms that stabilize or destabilize core functions. Projected climatic changes in the upcoming decades include temperature increases and fluctuations that would constrain crop productivity and its improvement. Going back to the wild ancestors of modern crops and investigating new sources of molecular variation, which underlies adaptation to biotic and abiotic challenges, is imperative. In our group, and in collaboration with others, we explore the triangle Environment-Genotype-Phenotype while observing both the source and sink organs that regulates grain yield. We develop genomic infrastructure (wild B1K collection & the interspecific wild-cultivated cytoplasmic multi-parent CMPP population) and phenomics tools (SensyPAM). These resources allow the scanning of barley genomes in search of the needles in the haystack (genes) that mediate these interactions. Furthermore, we develop and implement genome editing tools (RECAS9) to recombine alleles from the wild and cultivated backgrounds to allow pinpointing of causal variation that regulate the source-sink relationship under abiotic stresses.
