Creating climate smart sunflower for future challenges – the SMARTSUN multidisciplinary project

Among the effects of wide-ranging climate change, drought presents a significant threat to global agricultural production. Drought reduces yield quantity and quality of crops, particularly in the semiarid and arid regions. Better understanding of plant adaptation to drought is of great interest to both crop science and the society as a whole. Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops (IFVCNS) possesses one of the largest collections of different wild and cultivated sunflower genotypes and populations worldwide which will be exploited for analysis of drought tolerance mechanisms. Within the project SmartSun the holistic approach of phenotyping and epigenetic mechanisms which modulate sunflower adaptation to drought stresses driven by climate change will be exploited. Using statistical and machine learning techniques, SmartSun will link the data obtained from phenotyping and epiQTLs to create climate-smart sunflower genotypes that will respond to the variable, unstable, and drought environmental growth conditions