About

Overview

CRCIL’s mission is to identify and validate key traits that increase the resilience of wheat, sorghum, millet, and rice in the face of abiotic and biotic stressors like drought, flooding, temperature, salty soils, and pathogens.

Through its U.S. government-funded work, CRCIL aims to help double the world’s food supply by 2050 by improving the world’s key food security crops––wheat, sorghum, millet and rice, which are all grown in the United States and around the world.

CRCIL connects international researchers with U.S. collaborators to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in cereal research. This international collaboration will advance critical technologies and resources for the benefit of farmers and researchers around the globe.

Leveraging decades of effort in strengthening the crop breeding capacity of National Agriculture Research Institutes (NARIs), CRCIL is well-positioned to deliver on its ambitious objectives.

CRCIL’s consortia bring together experts from around the world to conduct research activities related to germplasm enhancement. NARIs also provide critical regional and institutional knowledge for project implementation.

CRCIL’s activities make the United States safer, stronger and more prosperous by focusing on ambitious, upstream science for the development of superior varieties of wheat, sorghum, millet and rice.

By identifying, validating, and transferring novel alleles for cereal crops, CRCIL is expanding the genetic toolkit of traits to draw from when developing new varieties of vital cereal crops that are more drought-, heat-, and disease-tolerant, leading to more profitability for U.S. producers and expanding global economic opportunities.