Looking to the Future of Plant Biology Research (original) (raw)

One hundred important questions facing plant science: an international perspective

New Phytologist, 2023

The 'One Hundred Important Questions Facing Plant Science Research' project aimed to capture a global snapshot of the current issues and future questions facing plant science. This revisiting builds on the original 2011 paper. Over 600 questions were collected from anyone interested in plants, which were reduced to a final list of 100 by four teams of global panellists. There was remarkable consensus on the most important topics between the global subpanels. We present the top 100 most important questions facing plant science in 2022, ranging from how plants can contribute to tackling climate change, to plant-defence priming and epigenome plasticity. We also provide explanations of why each question is important. We demonstrate how focussing on climate change, community and protecting plant life has become increasingly important for plant science over the past 11 years. This revisiting illustrates the collaborative and international need for long-term funding of plant science research, alongside the broad community-driven efforts to actively ameliorate and halt climate change, while adapting to its consequences.

The Global Garden project: Imagining plant science

PLANTS, PEOPLE, PLANET, 2020

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Under One Leaf. A Historical Perspective on the UK Plant Science Federation

The UK Plant Science Federation was established at the end of 2011. This article explores the significance of this venture through a lens based on the history of plant genetics throughout the 20 th century. We illustrate the advantages and difficulties in building and maintaining collaborative links between researchers working with crops and model species and the significance of such collaborations for the future of plant science in the UK and further afield. In particular, we explore how the success and failures in the plant molecular genetics and genomics sector can help inform the activities of the UKPSF and, conversely, how the UKPSF can help unite the many and various plant science spheres in the UK in order to tackle current global challenges. Chew YH, Halliday KJ. 2011. A stress-free walk from Arabidopsis to crops. Current Opinion in Biotechnology 22: 281-286. Comfort NC. 2001. The tangled field: Barbara McClintock's search for the patterns of genetic control. Harvard University Press. Gerats T, Strommer J. 2009. Petunia: Evolutionary, Developmental and Physiological Genetics. Springer. Hamilton A, Baulcombe DC. 1999. A species of small antisense RNA in posttranscriptional gene silencing in plants. Science 286: 950-952. Harwood J. 2000. The rediscovery of Mendelism in agricultural context: Erich von Tschermak as plant-breeder. Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences -Series III -Sciences de la Vie 323: 1061-1067. Jonkers K. 2010. Models and orphans; concentration of the plant molecular life science research agenda. Scientometrics 83: 167-179. Kirkby EA, Knight AH. 1977. Influence of the level of nitrate nutrition on ion