Expires on: 04/23/2024
Description
The Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences invites applications for a four-year PhD position part of the project “Unlocking genetic variation for climate adaptation of crops” in Prof. Tanja Slotte’s research group.
There is currently a pressing need to adapt crops to future climates by breeding more resilient varieties, and crop wild relatives are a promising yet underutilized source of genetic variation for breeding. In this project, we will test whether population genetic methods that identify genetic variants associated with environmental variation can efficiently identify adaptive genetic variation for crop improvement in collections of crop wild relatives. The project will focus on wild relatives of wheat and flax, which are promising sources of genetic variation for drought tolerance. The results are broadly important for more efficient utilization of crop wild relative collections to unlock wild genetic variation for food security and fibre production in a changing climate. The project is funded by Formas and will include collaborations with researchers at the Swedish Agricultural University (Uppsala and Alnarp, Sweden), Durham University (United Kingdom), and University of Granada (Spain).