Cropbooster-P: White Paper and Scientific Basis of the Strategic Research Agenda: CropBooster-P - Deliverable 4.2

The world of 2050 will be facing three major, primary challenges: Firstly, the world population will most probably have reached 9 to 10 billion people and will still be growing, particularly in Africa and Asia, although at reduced rates as compared to presently. To fulfil the growing demands for food and feed plant production has to be increased. In order to protect natural ecosystems and biodiversity, the area of agricultural land presently used should not be extended and, hence, the yield per area arable land must be enhanced substantially. Secondly, the global climate changes will exact its toll. Temperatures remain high and may even increase further, thus shortages in water supply for agriculture will prevail, and extreme weather conditions will occur more frequently. These developments will pose a severe stress to agricultural production leading to substantial decreases in primary plant production. It is, therefore, of prime importance to search for solutions how to stabilize yield.Thirdly, the current food system has become unsustainable, and there is an urgent need for substantial changes as stressed by the EU's Green Deal and its Farm-to-Fork Strategy. Mineral fertilizers and pesticides are heavily used in agriculture posing risks for human health, but, moreimportantly, they harm the environment as well as biodiversity. If the reductions in inputs are not to be mirrored at the yield level, the resource use efficiencies of our current crops have to be improved. Alternatively, novel (orphan) crops that are better adapted to the changing environments than the current ones have to be identified, trialled and, if found suitable, introduced into farming.Presently, European diets are still relatively meat-rich necessitating that large amounts of primary plant production have to be used for the feeding of livestock. Achieving a transition towards a plant-based diet requires that the cultivation of crops have to be intensified that are rich in food constituents such as proteins, vitamin or micronutrients which hitherto are mainly provided by meat consumption.Coping with these challenges and providing solutions requires an integrative and interdisciplinary approach that has to deal with three pressing issues of crop production, namely yield, nutritional quality, and sustainability. For each of these three topics we have, therefore, set up expert panels whose aim was to look at the three issues from various angles. Each focus group had to review the state of knowledge of their field, to identify the future challenges in the research field that should be addressed with high priority, and finally to outline action points for a future research programme

Infections with various types of organisms stimulate transcription from a short promoter fragment of the potato gst1 gene

By histochemical GUS staining, we demonstrate that transcription from a short promoter fragment of the potato gst1 gene is locally induced after infection of a host plant with various types of pathogenic or symbiotic organisms. This regulatory unit is not active in noninfected tissues, except root apices and senescing leaves. Measuring the expression of a fusion between the promoter fragment and the gus gene in transgenic plants, therefore, allows comparison of the induction of defense reactions in different types of plant-microbe interactions, in one and the same plant

Multi-dimensional Modeling and Simulation of Semiconductor Nanophotonic Devices

Self-consistent modeling and multi-dimensional simulation of semiconductor nanophotonic devices is an important tool in the development of future integrated light sources and quantum devices. Simulations can guide important technological decisions by revealing performance bottlenecks in new device concepts, contribute to their understanding and help to theoretically explore their optimization potential. The efficient implementation of multi-dimensional numerical simulations for computer-aided design tasks requires sophisticated numerical methods and modeling techniques. We review recent advances in device-scale modeling of quantum dot based single-photon sources and laser diodes by self-consistently coupling the optical Maxwell equations with semi-classical carrier transport models using semi-classical and fully quantum mechanical descriptions of the optically active region, respectively. For the simulation of realistic devices with complex, multi-dimensional geometries, we have developed a novel hp-adaptive finite element approach for the optical Maxwell equations, using mixed meshes adapted to the multi-scale properties of the photonic structures. For electrically driven devices, we introduced novel discretization and parameter-embedding techniques to solve the drift-diffusion system for strongly degenerate semiconductors at cryogenic temperatures. Our methodical advances are demonstrated on various applications, including vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, grating couplers and single-photon sources