Group Alexander Kaier

Food security, consumer preferences, and the imminent threats of the global climate change represent strong forces for breeders to find fast and efficient ways to develop new crop varieties accordingly. As a result, a precise and deep knowledge of abiotic stress resistance and the underlying genetic factors in plants is of utter most importance to find new targets for crop improvement.

The aim of our research is the analysis of different major and minor crop plants to reveal genomic and transcriptomic variations leading to improved crop performance under various stress conditions. To identify these factors we use state-of-the-art statistical and bioinformatic tools from the field of quantitative and population genetics. In addition, we take advantage of the increasingly powerful machine learning technologies. Together, these tools are used to analyze and integrate diverse data sets such as genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and phenomics. This helps us to disentangle gene regulatory networks and the genetic basis of complex traits and to find new targets for molecular breeding.

Currently, our research focuses on the multi-omics analysis of potato (Solanum tuberosum). It is one of the most important food crops globally and ranks third only behind the cereals rice and wheat. Due it’s steady increase in overall production it is considered an important staple food source. The modern cultivars originated from the Andes in South America between Bolivia and Peru. Domestication of wild potato dates back nearly 8,000 years. Cultivated potatoes were introduced into Europe in the 1570s and were distributed globally in the late 17th century. Today, potatoes are grown world-wide from latitudes of 65 ⁰N to 50 ⁰S and from altitudes of up to 4,000 m. This demonstrates the immense adaptability of potato to many different environmental conditions. Even though potato is well adapted to a variety of environmental conditions, it shows a high sensitivity to abiotic stress conditions such as heat and drought. Especially high temperature (temperatures above 20 ⁰C) impacts tuber production of potato negatively.

Due to the vastly changing climate, increasing global population, and the necessity to produce food even under suboptimal conditions, we are working with national and international partners to improve potato in one main projects. For details on each project please feel free to contact the PhD student working on the project or our group leader (Alexander Kaier).

• Epigenetics of heat tolerance in potato (Darren Yeo)

During the last decade, it is becoming increasingly clear that agronomic traits of crops such as tuber size and yield are inextricably linked with epigenetic regulation because of environmental stresses. Epigenetic gene regulation refers to the regulation of gene expression by modifying the genome without altering the sequences in the genome. One such epigenetic modification is the methylation and demethylation of cytosines. Methylation patterns may differ among different genotypes, individual plants or even among the tissues and are often associated with environmental stresses including heat stress. This phenomenon could potentially be true for potatoes as well when grown under heat stress. Thus, we aim to profile the methylation patterns among genotypes that show contrasting behavior regarding their heat tolerance. Differences in the methyliation patterns may help illuminate the mechanisms governing heat adaptation in this important crop.