While traditional crop breeding has been very efficient to enhance the food production for the expanding global population, climatic change toward greater aridity poses serious challenge to agricultural research.  It is widely accepted that breeding drought resistant high quality crop cultivars is a sustainable approach to confront global food security for the next century.  Modern and efficient crop breeding require a combination of genomic characterization with high-resolution rapid phenotyping system that will close the gaps between genotype and phenotype and correlate gene function with plant performance and responses to environment.

 

The Research and Education Facility for Crop stress Phenomics (Pheno-IL) enable researchers to conduct field experiments while using state-of-the-art equipment that replicates arid conditions and enable accurate monitoring of crop-plant response to drought conditions. The center composed of three rainout shelters, a cutting-edge and minimally invasive high-throughput phenotyping system and a field laboratory. The center serves as an educational hub for undergraduate training and graduate student projects, thereby equipping cadres of young scientists from Israel with the skills and knowledge they will need as they confront future agricultural and food security challenges.