DARKWIN

Tracking pollinator preferences in heat/drought-exposed tomato plants for resilience traits.

Climate change has brought about a range of challenges that threaten food security. With heat and drought being major stresses affecting crop physiology and ecosystem services, such as plant-pollinator interactions, identifying genetic traits of resilience is crucial. The EU-funded DARkWIN project proposes to track and rank pollinators’ preferences for flowers of a tomato mapping population exposed to heat and drought as a measure of functional source-to-sink relationships. It will develop a pollinator-assisted selection and phenotyping platform for automated quantification of genotype x pollinator x environment interactions through a bumblebee geo positioning system. DARkWIN will deliver tomato F1 pre-commercial varieties based on the natural biological process of pollinator-driven selection under climate change conditions.