Adaptation to climate change in the rhizosphere across the millennia (TOLERATE)

The project aims to search for new traits to adapt crops to a changing climate is of high priority within the EU adaptation strategy9. In TOLERATE, we will tackle this challenge via a novel approach by searching climate-resilient phenotypes that have evolved during past climate change events and are today stored in paleo-archives. We have acollection of paleoenvironmental samples (e.g., chronosequences of soil and sediments up to several millennia old) that contain aDNA from flora and microorganisms (rhizobiome) exposed to abiotic stressors in the past, represents a unique archive of evolutionary adaptations of biodiversity and functionality and also a treasure trove of genetic resources.