Designing Crops for Global Food Security

The Canada First Research Excellence Fund set up by the Canadian Government recently awarded Cdn$37M to the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) at the University of Saskatchewan (U. of S) to establish the Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P²IRC).  The seven years initiative is based on the U. of S campus in Saskatoon and involves researchers at variety of University departments, the Canadian Light Source (synchrotron), National Research Council Canada and Agriculture Canada & Agri-Food Canada.  More details about the funding can be found here: http://words.usask.ca/news/2015/07/29/u-of-s-awarded-37-2-million-to-design-crops-for-global-food-security/.

The intent of the funding is to utilize the various expertise on campus to establish a high throughput phenotyping platform in multiple crops with the inclusion of new imaging technologies and strong computational support.  Research in the P²IRC is broken down into fours theme: Theme 1 Phenometrics; Theme 2 Image Acquisition technologies; Theme 3 Computational Informatics of Crop Phenotype Data and Theme 4 Societal and Developing World Impact.  A description of the key component of the themes together with details on Theme 1 which comprises high throughput phenotyping, associative genomics and plant pedological phenotypes will be presented.