Detalle de: Convergence of ecological and digital transition into smart oleiculture: the case of salt stress in olive (DIGIOLIVE)

Soil salinisation is a natural process exacerbated by the climate change and will affect 50% of total agricultural lands by 2050. Salinisation affects almost all development stages during the plant life cycle, limiting the growth, development, and production of plants. The main toxicity comes from the increase of Na and Cl ions, but current agricultural practices and reliance on crops that exclude salt from uptake is counterproductive and environmentally unsustainable: the new paradigm should be the incorporation of halophytic traits in new crops or rootstocks. High-throughput sequencing combined with phenological, biochemical and physiological characterisations seem the best way to accumulate information about plant adaptations to salinity to alleviate saline pressure, improve production, and create new salt tolerant crops or rootstocks. The coordinated project DIGIOLIVE is proposed to reinforce a kind of 'smart oleiculture' and digitalised research within the current Breeding 3.0 era with the incorporation of many kinds of datasets about salinity in olive trees and integrate them in a digital, cutting-edge, bioinformatic tool with the tentative name Olive eXpression Atlas (OXA). OXA can be easily queried and whose outputs are easily interpretable, and will contain correlations and associations (based on statistical and artificial intelligence approaches) between transcript expression, polymorphisms, isoforms, phenology, physiology, biochemistry, and microbiota. OXA could be exploited by growers, breeders, and farmers since it may guide (1) research about salinity, (2) selection of biomarkers and biosensors for breeding/selection of crops and rootstocks, (3) reveal interdependences of genes, microbiome and physiology in long-term salt stress, (4) predict the effect of the agricultural practises, (5) decide which nutrients should be added in saline soils, etc. In summary, OXA will enable the in silico prospection of olive trees in salinity to optimise innovate sustainable agricultural practises under climate change, and predict if traditional or economically important salt-tolerant and salt-sensitive cultivars can be maintained in production grafted in new rootstocks adapted to saline soils. Consequently, the OXA will support the resilience of olive oil and table olive sectors facing unfavourable climate conditions expected in the next years, and strengthen the international competitivity and leadership of Spanish science and technology about olive.