Dr. René Klein Lankhorst is employed at Wageningen Plant Research which is part of Wageningen University & Research (WUR), the Netherlands, where he currently holds a position as Senior Scientist and Program Developer.
He studied biochemistry and anthropogenetics at the Rijks Universteit Groningen where he graduated in 1984. Next, he did his PhD research at Wageningen University on the subject of symbiotic nitrogen fixation by Rhizobium leguminosarum. After obtaining his PhD in molecular biology, he took up a post-doc position at the same university where he worked for 2 years in a program aiming at isolating the nematode-resistance gene Mi from tomato.
In 1993 he joined Wageningen Plant Research were he conducted research on the isolation of disease-resistance genes from plants. In 1998 he became general manager of Greenomics, which was WUR’s facility for high-throughput DNA sequencing, genome research and bio-informatics. In this position he was, amongst others, involved in the sequencing of the first genome of a plant species; Arabidopsis thaliana.
From 2006 till 2010 he coordinated the EU-SOL Project, which was the largest project on food safety and food quality in the 6th Framework Program of the European Union. As part of this program he was, amongst others, responsible for the European part of the international initiative to sequence the tomato genome. From 2009 until 2013 he was the Chairman of the International Solanaceae Initiative SOL, a global research network focussing on research of plants from the nightshade family.
From 2011 till 2015 he was appointed Managing Director of the BioSolar Cells program, a Dutch national research program to develop innovative strategies for improve photosynthesis in plants, in micro-organisms and in artificial systems for application in bio-energy production, production of chemical feedstock and in improving crop productivity.
Also in this period, he was one of the driving forces behind Photosynthesis 2.0, which was a research proposal to the European Commission for a large, international research program on improving plant photosynthesis to increase crop yield. This resulted in a request by the Commission to draft a ‘Roadmap to Future Proof our Plants’, an endeavour that is carried out in the framework of the CropBooster-P project which René is currently leading as coordinator on behalf of Wageningen Research.
In addition, in 2022 he was nominated as co-chair of the EPSO Working “Group Future Proofed Crops”.
Further activities concern co-leading the development of NPEC, which is the Dutch national facility for plant phenotyping, and he was member of the Organizing Committee of the 7th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium IPPS2022, which was hosted by Wageningen University & Research in September 2022.
Title: CropBooster-P, drafting a Roadmap to future-proof our crops.
Webinar date: Tuesday 7th February 14.00 CET
Abstract: There is an urgent need to transform the global food system in order to face some of the greatest challenges we face; how can we protect Earth’s vulnerable eco-systems, how can we harness ourselves against the imminent threats of climate change, and how will we be able to feed a future world population?
Part of the solution will be the development of novel crop varieties that combine a high resilience against abiotic stress with high resources use efficiency and a high crop yield. At request of the European Commission, the CropBooster-P project has developed over the past 4 years a roadmap that stipulates the way how we could develop the required “future proofed crops” in Europe. This roadmap not only details the scientific and technological options that are available to make our crops more resistant to, for example, heat and drought, to increase the efficiency of the use of water and other input, and to sustainably increase crop yields, but also outlines the societal constraints that would allow the future execution of the produced roadmap.
In this presentation, a bird-eye’s view of the CropBooster-P project will be presented as well as the current ideas as how to implement the roadmap.