Since crop species have been domesticated to fit it to humanity’s needs, their genomes hold the secrets to ancient and modern agricultural practices, which can serve as an informative reference for future breeding practices. Now the world population is expected to reach 10 billion, and the agricultural community must manage to ensure a safe and sustainable food supply for our future generations. In this situation, we aim to enhance crop breeding processes by the means of AI-aided genome analysis platform, and contribute to food security as an initiative in KAUST, as well as in the Kingdom. As the long-term objective, by accelerating conventional and gene editing breeding methods in conjunction with our Smart Breeding Platform (Figure), we will create the next generation of green super crops that are high yielding and more nutritious, while at the same time having reduced ecological footprints – i.e. crops that can grow with less water, fertilizers and pesticides; can grow on marginal lands, and have reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
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