Amid a changing climate, can plant science help save the planet?
In a greenhouse on a narrow mesa top at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I’m working with a research team studying the role of the soil microbiome in how maize grows and tolerates drought.
As the global climate warms, we more often see drought gripping croplands while irrigation water becomes scarce in some of the most important food-producing regions of the United States and around the world.
Understanding the plantmicrobiome connection is one example of studying plants to potentially bring fresh solutions to big problems facing humanity. Considering how vital plants are to us and all life on earth, you’d think plant science would be topof-mind in the research world. It’s not.
Some dismiss plant science as an old field lacking fertile new ground. Because it’s overlooked in schools, interested students often struggle to find research questions that could make a difference. Disheartened by this lack of direction and inspiration, the budding plant scientist may run low on motivation — and funding.
We shouldn’t let that happen.
Plant science can deliver crucial insights in broader efforts to solve some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. But we won’t find those solutions if we don’t ask the right questions.
To help bring focus and encouragement to the field, a panel of plant scientists published a study listing the top 100 most pressing plant-science research questions addressing some of the greatest challenges facing humanity.
I was one of 20 panelists selected from Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Oceania and Africa to curate the questions. In regional teams, we sifted through more than 600 questions submitted from around the globe by anyone — not only scientists — interested in plants. We then edited those submissions into the top 100 most important questions facing plant science. The paper revisits a similarly named 2011 paper on the same subject.
The right questions
The questions range widely, with topic areas including food scarcity, plant-based fuels, genetically modified organisms, growing seaweed as a carbon sink, using algae to clean up oil spills, how soil microorganisms affect stress in plants, and even growing plants in space to support human life.
Here are the top 11 questions from the study, by category:
♦ Climate change: How will climate change impact plant abundance, productivity, bioregions, and ecosystems?
♦ Science in the community: How can we ensure that the varied goals and needs of our diverse societies are understood and fulfilled by plant scientists?
♦ Food security: How do we leverage existing genetic diversity to create climate-resilient crops?
♦ Biodiversity: How does species diversity develop in novel ecosystems such as restored agricultural land, forests, grasslands, and gardens?
♦ Sustainability: Could plant-defense priming be a platform for a new green revolution?
♦ Plant-plant interactions: How are interactions between plant species regulated?
♦ Plant disease: How should we prepare for novel pathogens of trees, crops, and the natural environment?
♦ Plant-microbiome interactions: How does the plant microbiome affect stress tolerance?
♦ Plant adaption: What is the plasticity of the epigenome of plants?
♦ Plant stress responses: How do plants cope with combined stressors?
♦ Ecosystem services: What natural materials could be invested in for a more sustainable future of manufacturing or residential development?
Maize to alleviate hunger
The eighth question — how does the plant microbiome affect stress tolerance? — concerns Los Alamos’ research into plants and the microbiome community in soils. Our work illustrates how well-focused science can address global problems. We saw that changing climate threatens the food supply, which in turn threatens national security, so in our work we’re looking at ways to breed the best microbiome to simultaneously improve maize’s performance while reducing the need for water and fertilizer. That could one day alleviate hunger across the globe, bringing food security wherever heat and drought are threatening crops.
The same approach with microbiomes could also give us new tools for reversing environmental degradation, bolstering struggling ecosystems and even addressing excessive carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere.
Our own fate as people is intertwined with that of plants. In fact, without plants, we’d be nowhere. Literally. Plants put oxygen in the air, so we can breathe. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, balancing it and regulating temperature, so we don’t overheat. They provide food, raw materials, and habitats for animals.
Asking plants the right questions is one way to ensure our own survival.
A version of this article appeared in Real Clear Science.