Michael Baum, O. Abdalla, A. Amri, , Z. Bishaw, F. Capettini, M. Imtiaz, F. Ogbonnaya
Biodiversity and Integrated Gene Management Program,
International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas

ICARDA’s mission is to contribute to the improvement of livelihoods of the resource-poor in dry areas by enhancing food security and alleviating poverty through research and partnerships to achieve sustainable increases in agricultural productivity and income, while ensuring the efficient and more equitable use and conservation of natural resources. Climate change, depleted ground water reserves, population growth, desertification, salinity, demand for bio-fuels create a potential uncertain future for agriculture. The need to collect and conserve biodiversity has never been more urgent. Plant breeders will increasingly have to screen collections for traits essential to keep pace with rapidly changing agro-ecosystems. Water availability is the major challenge for production of cereals and food legumes in dry areas. Proven technologies are the development of water efficient cultivars which can be tailored to these environments and new cropping systems. Exploitation of landraces and wild relatives have boosted the level of drought tolerance measured as yield increases and enhanced WUE in these crops under Mediterranean environments. ICARDA with its partners have developed the Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) to choose subsets of accessions from the global collection that have a high probability of containing the trait of interest. This strategy has already been successfully applied to some biotic stresses and the search for abiotic stress will follow. Identification of the genes responsible for drought tolerance will facilitate the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of drought tolerance, and serve for biotechnology-assisted genetic improvement through marker assisted selection or gene transformation.  We are using several genomic tools to identify such key genes. We have used microarray analysis to identify candidate genes. These candidate genes are mapped onto mapping population or association panels and analysis of quantitative traits loci (QTL) is performed. Ultimately, these candidate genes are used in plant transformation to improve drought tolerance.