​​New crops for more extreme climate conditions: contributing to sustainable nutrition and safe nutrition​ (KB-54-000-001)

Existing arable crops in the Netherlands lack resilience under increasingly more extreme climatic conditions, i.e., wetter, drier and hotter. New, more resilient crops to extreme climatic conditions can outperform existing crops under such conditions, but lack a history of advanced breeding, and knowledge on productivity, food safety risks, implementation into agrosystems and development of food products. This project studies the opportunities and challenges of new crops for able to grow under more extreme climatic conditions by developing new strategies and tools in the field of genetics and plant breeding, agrosystems modelling, omics for quality/risk aspects, and tools to assess (processing) conditions for microbiological and chemical safety of products made of new crops.

Objective 1: Develop knowledge on genetics and plant breeding methods in new crops with lupin, quinoa and sunflower as example target crops. (WP1)

High throughput phenotyping evaluation protocols (in NPEC) and using field trial data for example from existing Top Sector projects will be developed. The possibility of using AI techniques like ML will be investigated.

Objective 2: Develop knowledge on the scope and potential productivity of more resilient crops in the Netherlands (WP2)

The cropping areas will be quantified that will face increased climate extremes, including drought, inundation, heat stress and salination in the Netherlands. Projections of crop productivity will be made for future, more extreme conditions using crop growth models.

Objective 3: Improving quality: less anti-nutritional factors (compounds and proteins), and better taste of new crop products (WP3)

It will be investigated how a metabolomics and proteomics analysis approach can help to identify and quantify quality and anti-nutritional factors (ANFs) in new crops.

Objective 4: Improving our understanding of food safety hazards and trade-offs in use of new crops under extremer climates (WP4)

It will be investigated how chemical food safety parameters, such as pesticide residuals, mycotoxins and plant toxins, are affected by using crop rotations that employ novel cropping systems and/or new crops.

Objective 5: Pattern discovery and predictive modelling for sustainable and safe food chains (including potential effects of processing on product made using new crops) (WP5)

For new crops there is uncertainty in ensuring food safety and nutrition security. This part will develop predictive models for food safety for new raw materials (also from new crops for extreme conditions) based on the huge amount of food data (e.g. food processing in relation to safety, nutritional and functional parameters) available in the scientific literature and using predictive modelling to assess microbiological safety of new food crops and products.

Exchange group on AI-tools

In many of the WPs, the use and development of AI tools will be explored.