Among the now many projects that use AI there is one that concerns agriculture, which is particularly interesting, and was born from a collaboration between Microsoft and Crea (the Council for agricultural research and the analysis of agricultural economics) . A cereal essential to human life is at risk due to climate change, but Crea and Microsoft are working on a global project, Pangenome, to create a resistant supergrain.
What does AI have to do with it? Very much so, because it allows us to decode the DNA of durum wheat by analyzing millions of data with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, which is available online in real time. It is a real and very complex artificial selection, with the aim of isolating the genes and creating a resistant wheat. The project, among other things, is directed by Italy, by Crea, together with the University of Bologna and Saskatchewan, and financed with Pnrr-Agritec funds.
Climate change has in fact made it increasingly difficult and unsustainable to cultivate current wheat varieties. «Through extensive research», explains Luigi Cattivilli, director of the Centre, fifty varieties of durum wheat species have already been selected». It’s not a walk in the park, the best researchers are working on it and, thanks to powerful computing systems and the Cloud, they can work simultaneously on the same data, from anywhere in the world. With the help of generative AI, which makes suggestions. Not bad.
I just hope that the usual ideological Paleolithics who don’t want anything that is the result of science and technology don’t emerge (as happened with GMOs) (in this case they will do without wheat: a solution must be found, and this is giving surprising results). Who, however, in case of need, never give up an antibiotic, as if antibiotics were born on trees.