The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) is contributing €15 million to PlantXR, a research program of CropXR into “smart breeding” for extra-resilient crops (eXtra Resilient, XR). This brings CropXR’s total budget to over €90 million for the next 10 years. TU Delft announced this in a press release.
- NWO is putting €15 million into PlantXR, part of CropXR.
- The goal is to cultivate extra-resilient (XR) crops.
- These plants must be more resistant to climate change.
The NWO decision is the go-ahead for the new Dutch institute CropXR, which will integrate plant biology, simulation models, and artificial intelligence into “smart breeding methods” to make crops more resistant to climate change and less dependent on crop protection products. TU Delft is collaborating in this initiative with Utrecht University, Wageningen University and Research, the University of Amsterdam and dozens of companies from the Dutch plant breeding, biotechnology, and processing industries on fundamental scientific research, data collection and data sharing, education, and promoting the wide application of the outcomes.
More resilience is urgently needed
Faster development of extra-resilient crops is necessary worldwide as many crops face more extreme conditions (such as heat, drought, flooding and pathogens) under the influence of climate change. At the same time, stricter environmental regulations will require farmers to use less fertilizer and chemical crop protection products to protect plants in the future. Only with more resilient crops can agriculture and horticulture produce enough sustainably grown crops in the coming decades.
TU Delft contributes to CropXR from multiple disciplines
Manuel Mazo is contributing to the research on behalf of TU Delft: “In CropXR, we are investigating the resilience of crop varieties to water shortage, pests and other stress factors for crop growth. We try to infer the specific genes responsible for increasing the resilience of a crop variety from collected experimental data models. My colleague Luca Laurenti’s group and I are developing new tools to analyze biological systems. A combination of both mechanical and data-driven techniques models these.”
His colleague Marcel Reinders adds: “CropXR offers a great opportunity to leverage TU Delft’s AI expertise in smarter use of crop data to accelerate understanding of plant physiology. We envision a unique approach in which AI is coupled with mechanical modeling, giving breeders a more targeted approach to making plants more resilient and more widely applicable worldwide.”
Financial contributions from multiple parties
In addition to the financial contribution from the NWO Long-Term Program PlantXR, CropXR already received funding from the National Growth Fund (NGF) in 2022, when the proposal for CropXR submitted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV) was honored. Also contributing financially to the development of resilient crops are the Foundation for Food & Agricultural Research (FFAR), private parties and knowledge institutions.
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