Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Global climate change, environmental degradation, and population growth all underline the need to enhance agricultural sustainability and productivity. Plant diversity is the foundation of crop improvement and sustainable agriculture, and we make use of only a fraction of the available diversity to grow our food. As Acadia University’s Tier 2 CRC in Agri-Food and Sustainable Agriculture, Dr. Zoë Migicovsky will leverage diverse agricultural data sets in order to enable evidence-based decisions in both plant breeding and management, with the goal of increasing the resiliency and sustainability of our food production systems. Building on nearly a decade of work, Dr. Migicovsky’s research will focus on woody perennial fruit crops and their wild relatives, with three primary objectives. Objective 1 is to quantify plant diversity across woody perennial fruit crops, such as apples and grapes, and their wild relatives. To do so, she will make use of novel and high-throughput methods to characterize unexploited plant variation that must be harnessed if we are to create more sustainable agro-ecosystems. Woody perennials are large, expensive to maintain, and have a lengthy juvenile phase, which means that years will pass before fruit is available to evaluate. Objective 2 is to identify genetic markers associated with variation in agriculturally important traits and develop resources for genomics-assisted crop improvement, allowing offspring to be screened at the seedling stage (prior to the development of fruit). As a result, this research will decrease the cost, improve efficiency, and enable the introduction of important traits of interest into the breeding pool. Lastly, the majority of perennial fruit crops are grown by grafting plants onto rootstocks. The aim of Objective 3 is to evaluate the effect of rootstocks on grafted shoot systems as well as the micro-organisms associated with the plant. Dr. Migicovsky’s research program will collect and analyze trait data of plants grafted to different rootstocks to determine their effect both below- and above-ground. As the CRC in Agri-Food and Sustainable Agriculture, Dr. Migicovsky will work to quantify and harness natural variation in woody perennial fruit crops, helping us to better adapt to a changing climate, manage evolving pests and pathogens, meet consumer preferences, and satisfy the increasing worldwide demand for food.