Where Will Our Farmlands be in the Next Decade?

LSU scientists proactively look at ‘extreme’ environments for crop production.

The global population is expected to extend well beyond nine billion by 2050, with most of the growth occurring in developing countries. Contrarily, global food production is struggling to keep up with demand, largely from the harsh effects of environmental destruction and poor agricultural practices.

Drought and salinity have long been major factors affecting crop production, and these abiotic, or physical, stressors have already increased so significantly in recent years that conventional agricultural practices and lands traditionally used for farming are likely to be abandoned.

“This is a global crisis. Not only will we not have enough food to meet demands, we won’t have enough good quality food, and we will not have the land or sufficient freshwater to grow the food,” said Maheshi Dassanayake, an associate professor of biological sciences in the College of Science.

Through a recently awarded $1.5 million National Science Foundation and United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation EDGE grant, an international collaboration led by Dassanayake and several collaborators, John Larkin, a professor in biological sciences; Aaron Smith, an associate professor in biological sciences; and Dong-Ha Oh, a research assistant professor in biological sciences, will develop a genomic toolkit to study wild plants that can be used as models to investigate how plants tolerate environmental stressors.

In this collaborative project LSU scientists are partnering with scientists at University of Michigan to create maps of genes expressed at single-cell-scale, in addition to scientists from Ben-Gurion and Tel Aviv Universities in Israel to generate molecular tools to monitor plant stress from single cell to entire organism scale.

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