BMFTR: FABALOUS
FABALOUS is a research initiative funded by the BMFTR with 15 project partners at seven locations. FABALOUS was approved on May 15, 2025, and is designed to last for four years. The goal of the consortium is to create a molecular and physiological knowledge base for targeted breeding of climate-adapted faba beans. In FABALOUS, we initially aim to understand the stress response to combined heat and drought stress in the existing breeding pool. This serves as a starting point to purposefully expand genetic diversity and improve combined stress responses in the second funding phase.
The project is structured into three main lines of research. The first line of research utilizes a representative set of genetically and physiologically distinct accessions, which will be analyzed for their response to key agronomic and physiological parameters under single and combined abiotic stress factors. These analyses will also include the investigation of beneficial microbes as "stress-protective microbes." In parallel, datasets from metabolomics, transcriptomics, and epigenomics will be used with systems biology methods to identify candidate genes that can improve vegetative and reproductive development under stress through genome editing. Secondly, FABALOUS will combine association mapping from various populations with genome structure analyses to obtain markers associated with stress resilience under very different environmental conditions. These markers can be directly used to improve yield stability through breeding and genome editing. Thirdly, FABALOUS will benefit from access to a unique above-ground heat pumping facility located under a field in Bad Nauheim to study the effects of heat stress at field scale. Establishing this “heat field” system in the first funding phase will allow us to investigate genotype x environment x management effects of faba beans in crop rotations, as well as the effects of nitrogen fixation under heat stress at field scale. The system will be invaluable for assessing the impacts of heat on genotype-pollinator interactions and will serve as a starting point for further functional assessments in the second funding phase.