Center for Desert Agriculture

The Center for Desert Agriculture is a research center specializing in the study, engineering, and implementation of sustainable agriculture in harsh environments. It is affiliated with King Abdullah University for Science and Technology "KAUST" and located on the university campus in Thuwal Center, eighty km north of Jeddah City in Makkah al-Mukarramah Province, west of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Center was established to support research related to local and regional agriculture and to translate it into real solutions that benefit the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The Center for Desert Agriculture supports research concerned with providing solutions to global challenges related to food provision, which is one of the university's four strategic research areas, including water, energy, and the environment.

The establishment of the center represents the next phase of KAUST's efforts to develop a long-term research force to find solutions to many of the major challenges facing societies, such as ensuring food provision. The center includes scientists specialized in producing crops with high nutritional value using gene technology, through a combined approach derived from enzymology and genetic genomics to identify new plant signaling molecules associated with abiotic stress and growth.

The center has a ten-year goal to study, test, and implement safe and sustainable crop production systems in the Kingdom. These systems aim to produce and deliver fresh, nutritious, and high-value crops to the citizens of the Kingdom with low environmental impact (e.g., less water, fertilizers, pesticides, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions), thereby promoting healthy lifestyles and a clean environment for future generations.

The center implements multiple initiatives focusing on developing sustainable, low-input systems that use water efficiently to produce food and grains, suitable for the coastal desert environment that relies on seawater and sunlight for agriculture. The center adopts an approach that works on producing food for the future.

The center houses eleven specialized research laboratories including the BioActives Laboratory, Genetics and Cereal Genomics Laboratory, Darwin21 Laboratory, Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology Laboratory, Plant Cell and Developmental Biology Laboratory, Plant Breeding and Genetics Laboratory, Salt Laboratory, Stress Granule Laboratory, Systems Biology Laboratory, Winch Laboratory, and Wolf Laboratory.