Development of drought tolerant energy crops based on field researches in the North American arid areas
Description: Non-food energy crops such as Miscanthus spp. have been taken attention as one of feedstocks for renewable energy such as biofuels. They are required to be cultivated in marginal agriculture lands where environmental stresses such as droughts occur. At the two sites in Japan and the United States, we evaluated the drought tolerance and measured photosynthetic characteristics using various strains of Miscanthus spp. Genotypes with excellent drought tolerance were almost consistent in both sites experiments, and Miscanthus sinensis “PMS-285” from the Yangtze-Qinling Mountains region showed excellent drought tolerance and high photosynthetic ability even in drought condition. In addition, regarding Miscane (hybrids between Miscanthus and sugarcane), the photosynthetic ability at low temperature, which is related to drought tolerance, is intermediate between both parents. This finding reveals that Miscanthus could contributes to improve environmental adaptability of sugarcane.
Amount: ¥15,990,000
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
Start date: 2017-04-01
End date: 2020-03-31
Investigator: Toshihiko YAMADA
Institution: Hokkaido University
Subfield: Agronomy and Crop Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Funded outputs count: 13
Funder award ID: 17H04615
OpenAlex ID: G2000323562