Advanced tools for breeding BARley for Intensive and SusTainable Agriculture under climate change scenarios

Improving the genetic potential of the seeds is the most effective way to introduce the innovation in agriculture needed to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Plant breeding allows improvement of crop sustainability and yield potential through the introgression of specific traits capable of coping with climate change, disease shifts, and resource limitations. Taking barley both as a target and a model, BARISTA will deliver new breeding strategies and toolkits for boosting crop improvement, leading to new, high-yielding varieties selected to cope with anticipated future climatic conditions. Acceleration of conventional breeding through a combination of high-precision phenotyping, detailed genomic information, high density genetic maps, bioinformatics, and genetic modelling and crop growth simulation methods can provide the quantum leap improvement needed for achieving the SDGs (especially 2, 6, 8, 12, 13, 15) under a rapidly changing global climate.