Growing Rice in the Desert

Crops that are tolerant to saltwater will be an important food source for the future

KAUST is developing saltwater-tolerant rice for crop production in desert environments. Part of KAUST’s Desert Agriculture Initiative, innovations in rice cultivation are poised to solve one of the most significant global challenges: feeding a nationally and globally growing population sustainably.

As the human population grows from 7.8 billion to 10 billion over the next 30 years, agricultural breeders must do everything possible to create crops that are highly productive and nutritious, while creating less of an environmental footprint. Rice will be critical to meeting this demand. KAUST researchers are mapping the full range of genetic diversity in rice crops in order to select high-yielding varieties adaptable to desert conditions.

Not only will adaptation to environmental conditions be important, but adapting to limited or alternative agricultural inputs will be crucial. Freshwater is becoming threatened all over the world, making it increasingly likely that the use of seawater for irrigation will become one of the tools used in the future of farming. At present, most crops cannot handle the salt in seawater, thus researchers at KAUST are looking for rice plants that can tolerate salty water. They are surveying thousands of genetic markers to find the ones that correlate with salinity tolerance. KAUST researchers have identified certain genes, especially in the Indica rice group, that have proved to be more salt-tolerant than other rice varieties. These are being used for breeding experiments that could increase global rice productivity.

Rod Wing, KAUST Professor of Plant Science and Director of the Center for Desert Agriculture, is leading the genetics research on rice – particularly the discovery and utilization of natural variation in the rice genus Oryza. Professor Wing’s lab is focusing on the generation of platinum-standard reference genomes for cultivated rice and its wild relatives to create a pan-Oryza genome that will serve as a template to create a digital genebank for rice. This digital genebank will be interrogated to discover and analyze essentially all single nucleotide polymorphisms and the structural variation that exists across the genus. Such data will be linked with high-throughput phenotyping data derived from a global rice array composed of some 3,000 diverse rice accessions planted in multiple locations around the world over multiple seasons. Data can then be used to accelerate the breeding of “green super rice” varieties that are adapted to different environmental conditions, including the deserts of the Middle East.

Professor Wing has been working with rice for 25 years. In 2005, he played a pivotal role in the creation of the first reference genome of a crop, Asian domesticated rice. He has led global efforts in building reference genomes for wild and cultivated rice species and mining their diversity. His ongoing efforts to build the digital rice genebank through sequencing diverse rice germplasm is helping to introduce rice breeding by design, which could yield enormous positive benefits for global food production.

Professor Wing’s research has become of particular interest to NEOM, the Kingdom’s new $500 billion megaproject in the north-west of Saudi Arabia. Professor Wing was recently appointed to the founding board of an agricultural organisation dedicated to developing agriculture in the Shamma Valley at NEOM.

INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

“KAUST’s Professor Rod Wing is a driving force in the field of plant genomics. His work lays the foundation for future rice breeding by design to ensure food security for all humankind.”

Dr. Matthew Morell, Director General of the Board of Trustees of the International Rice Research Institute

KAUST CENTER FOR DESERT AGRICULTURE

Helping to solve the question of feeding 10 billion people

KAUST’s Center for Desert Agriculture (CDA) is embarking on worldwide solutions to the challenge of sustainably feeding a global population of 10 billion people by 2050. Through applied research, student training, community outreach, and partnerships with government, academia and industry, the CDA is working to develop sustainable crop production systems in desert environments.

The food system, both in the Kingdom and around the world, is one of the most unsustainable of all human activities – consuming 66% of global water supply and 30% of global energy supply, accounting for 50% of all land used by humans and emitting 33% of all greenhouse gases. Both Saudi Arabia and the world will need to produce more food within the next 30 years if the growing global population is to be fed sustainably. The UN projects that Saudi Arabia’s population will grow from 34 million to 39 million by 2030, and to 44 million by 2050.

To meet this challenge, the CDA is leading the charge through data-driven science and future-focused innovation. The center aims to advance the fundamental knowledge and tools necessary to improve existing crop varieties, domesticate new crops, and create novel crop production systems that can sustainably produce food in the Kingdom’s and the region’s challenging environment. With its team of world-class scientists and engineers, the CDA envisages sustainable crop production systems that will produce and deliver fresh, nutritious and high-value crops to the nation with a reduced environmental footprint (e.g., less water, fertilizer, pesticides and greenhouse emissions), thereby promoting healthy lifestyles and a clean environment for generations to come. The CDA’s goals align directly with many of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 for national transformation.

The CDA has three primary research themes: 1) field-based crop systems focusing on date palms and neodomestication of both crop-wild relatives and other wild plant species that can grow in extreme ecosystems such as saltwater; 2) greenhouse-based crop systems focusing on achieving the lowest possible freshwater footprint; and 3) algae-based production systems that capitalize on the Kingdom’s large coastal areas with warm water and high solar irradiance, which are essential features for the sustainable and economic production of algae.