Plant Functional Genomics
The Chair of Plant Functional Genomics studies plant traits related to healthy food and sustainable agriculture. Climate change and declining biodiversity make it necessary to understand the basis of natural variation observed in breeding lines. Our vision is that understanding this variation will be the basis for defining strategies to further strengthen important traits to make plants more resilient to stress, more nutritious and therefore healthier.
Strengthening plants can be achieved through conventional breeding by telling the breeder which genomic regions (genes) to select for after crossing plants. However, new breeding techniques such as gene and genome editing have made it possible to achieve similar genome tweaks much more precisely and quickly. Gene editing, such as CRISPR-Cas, can be used to make small changes in targeted genes or to induce very specific structural changes in a chromosome. These new breeding techniques make it possible to apply nature's lessons to crops much more quickly and precisely than breeders can by crossing plants.
Unfortunately, these technologies have only been developed in a few crops, such as tomato, and are very difficult to apply to many other crops. Therefore, a second focus of Plant Functional Genomics will be to develop methods to apply new breeding technologies to crops other than tomato.
