PHENO-DROP project ̶ advancing drought resilience in bread wheat through genomics and phenomics innovations

Abstract

Bread wheat is a vital rainfed crop in both Italy and Serbia, where climate change has led to an increased frequency of droughts and extreme weather events, presenting serious threats to yield and yield stability. Traditional breeding approaches have achieved limited success in improving drought tolerance due to the complex, low-heritability nature of this trait and strong genotype-by-environment interactions. The project “New PHENO-ideotypes for DROught resilience in hexaPloid wheat – PHENO-DROP”, supported by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation of the Republic of Serbia, under the Call for Joint Research and Innovation Projects 2024–2026 between Italy and Serbia, aims to address these challenges. The main focus of this bilateral project is to strengthen scientific excellence and innovation capacities through the exchange of practical and theoretical knowledge between research institutions in Italy and Serbia to improve hexaploid wheat breeding for drought conditions. PHENO-DROP integrates high-throughput phenomics, genomics, and bioinformatics to explore and validate drought-resilient pheno-ideotypes in a diverse panel of hexaploid wheat germplasm, including both landraces and modern bread wheat varieties. The project focuses on key traits related to Water Use Efficiency (WUE), such as root architecture, stomatal characteristics, osmotic adjustment, and canopy-level indices. It will assess genetic variability within wheat landraces to identify phenotypic traits, key genes, and regulatory mechanisms underlying water scarcity tolerance. Additionally, it will evaluate yield stability and identify associated phenotypic traits in a panel of modern Serbian and Italian wheat varieties across diverse environments. These outcomes will foster innovation in breeding approaches and support sustainable wheat production in drought-prone regions of the pan-Adriatic zone