The need for high-yielding, stress tolerant crop varieties is readily apparent with the prediction of more frequent and more severe droughts, increased soil salinity due to poor irrigation practices, and the need to expand production on marginal lands. Research on cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), one of the world’s most important oilseed crops, has shown substantial tolerance to drought, salinity stress, and low nutrients being present in this species. Using a combination of genomics, high-throughput phenotyping, and detailed plant ecophysiological analysis it is now possible to identify the traits, mechanisms and genes associated with tolerance to these stresses.

Andries is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, GA, USA. At UGA, he has led several large-scale, National Science Foundation funded, experiments on drought, salinity and low nutrient stress using a diversity panel of 288 genotypes, capturing > 90% of the allelic diversity in sunflower. At INRA, he is collaborating on the Heliaphen platform to determine phenotypic and transcriptional changes in response to drought in key genotypes across multiple stress levels and multiple time points. He is particularly interested in using the genomics toolkit available in crop species to understand the mechanistic basis of plant ecophysiology under stressful conditions.