New Technologies for 21st Century Plant Science

Abstract

Plants are one of the most fascinating and important groups of organisms living on Earth. They serve as the conduit of energy into the biosphere, provide food, and shape our environment. If we want to make headway in understanding how these essential organisms function and build the foundation for a more sustainable future, then we need to apply the most advanced technologies available to the study of plant life. In 2009, a committee of the National Academy highlighted the "understanding of plant growth" as one of the big challenges for society and part of a new era which they termed "new biology." The aim of this article is to identify how new technologies can and will transform plant science to address the challenges of new biology. We assess where we stand today regarding current technologies, with an emphasis on molecular and imaging technologies, and we try to address questions about where we may go in the future and whether we can get an idea of what is at and beyond the horizon.We believe that the major three challenges for humankind in the 21st century are food, energy, and the environment, including climate change and environmental degradation due to pollution and habitat loss. In a word: sustainability. Plant life plays an essential role in all three of these sustainability challenges. All of our food and the majority of our energy are produced by photosynthetic plants. Plants are major players in determining our climate, and agricultural expansion is a major factor in habitat encroachment and pollution of waterways by fertilizer application and runoff. Furthermore, these issues are not independent; as the climate changes, additional challenges are placed on plant performance and, thus, food supply and habitat. Research on plants is needed to provide solutions to these major challenges.The fundamental biology of plants is similar to our own; they use the same genetic code, share many homologous genes, and even many regulatory mechanisms, basic biochemical pathways, and fundamental processes in cell biology. However, their form and lifestyle are fundamentally different. Plants can reach individual life spans of up to 5000 years; they can obtain adequate nutrition from the air and soil and survive adverse environmental conditions and attacks from pests, pathogens, and herbivores, despite remaining rooted in one spot for their lifetime. Plants are master chemists and can defend themselves with an incredible arsenal of chemicals. Many plants do not have a determinate body plan; a single genome is capable of producing an enormous range of size and form. Thus, plants are also valuable basic research objects since we can learn fundamental principles that are shared with humans and at the same time learn how different wiring can create such fundamental differences in form, biochemistry, and function.While some of the richest ideas in the life sciences have been developed without application of specialized technology (the theory of natural selection and evolution stands out as a prime example), technology is mo...

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