Subject area Applied Genetics and Crop Genetic Improvement

Towards next generation crops: productive, resilient and resource-efficient

Applied genetics and crop genetic improvement is crucial for addressing some of the most pressing challenges facing global agriculture and food systems. By understanding how genetic variation shapes plant performance, we can develop crop varieties that are more productive, resilient, and resource-efficient. This work enables us to:

• Enhance food security by increasing crop yields and stability in the face of climate change, population growth, and shrinking arable land.
• Improve resilience to biotic stresses (such as pests and diseases) and abiotic stresses (such as drought, heat, and salinity), reducing reliance on chemical inputs and supporting sustainable production systems.
• Boost nutritional quality and health-promoting traits, contributing to healthier diets and better public health outcomes.
• Support biodiversity and adaptation by preserving and utilising genetic diversity in breeding programmes, ensuring crops can adapt to changing environmental conditions.

Ultimately, this subject area empowers us to create the next generation of crop varieties that meet the needs of farmers, consumers, and ecosystems—locally and globally.

What we do

With advances in molecular genomic technologies, phenotyping, and computational systems, we now have powerful opportunities to design more efficient and precise approaches to plant breeding. We harness the full potential of genomics by combining it with other omics disciplines, quantitative genetics, envirotyping, and crop management. This integrated approach allows us to conduct comparative analyses of genotypic, phenotypic, and pedigree information for key crop traits.

Our research in crop genetics spans a wide range of subfields, each helping us deepen our understanding of how genetic variation influences plant performance and how these insights can drive crop improvement. Through a participatory and practice-oriented approach, we also work with networks of small-scale and professional growers who contribute to citizen science initiatives for variety selection and field testing, accelerating the development of elite selections across diverse environments.

We have a long history of engagement across these subfields, building strong research groups that conduct successful work on both temperate and tropical crops. We also play leading roles in education and training at the BSc, MSc, and doctoral levels, contributing actively to national and international programmes.

Our key focus areas

• Transmission Genetics: We study the genetic makeup of crops and how traits are inherited, enabling us to improve characteristics such as resilience to biotic and abiotic stress and nutritional quality.
• Population Genetics: We analyse genetic diversity within and among crop populations, considering natural selection, gene flow, and genetic drift. This helps us refine and optimise our breeding strategies.
• Quantitative Genetics: We investigate traits controlled by multiple genes, using statistical approaches to estimate heritability and to predict breeding outcomes for complex traits such as yield and stress tolerance.
• Variety development: We develop varieties of apple, black currant, potato and sweet potato for cultivation in Sweden.