Branching is a main morphogenetic process involved in the adaptation of plants to the environment. In grasses, tillering is divided into three phases: tiller emergence, cessation of tillering and tiller regression...
How much wheat do we need? One prediction is we need production to double between 2005 and 2050. This challenge is more difficult due to abiotic stress with climate change. Long Li and colleagues have been examining...
Functional–structural plant models (FSPMs) explicitly describe individual plant architecture, making this approach suitable for unravelling plant–plant interactions in complex canopies. Barillot et al. developed a...
Cultivar mixtures have an important role to play in reducing the propagation of diseases, as is evident from the well-documented results of growing mixtures of cultivars from plants that exhibit different levels of...
Maize and wheat are globally important food crops. The two species can be grown as an intercrop, with substantial land sparing in the order of 20%, as expressed by a land equivalent ratio of approximately 1.2. In a...
Long root hairs enable the efficient uptake of poorly mobile nutrients such as phosphorus. Mapping the chromosomal locations of genes that control root hair length can help exploit the natural variation within crops to...
Roots, the ‘hidden half’ of plants, are notoriously difficult to phenotype. Xie et al. utilise a ‘pouch and wick’ high-throughput phenotyping pipeline to quantify the variation in seedling root system architecture of...
One of the Grand Challenges – and, arguably, the Holy Grail – of plant research at present is an attempt to improve the photosynthetic efficiency of plants. Somewhat surprisingly, the fundamental photosynthetic pathway...
Based on a mechanistic approach, the CN-Wheat model simulates the fluxes of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) metabolites in wheat plants after anthesis. Barillot et al. show that the CN-Wheat model can be used to predict...
Linking traits and metabolic processes to whole plant performance results in improved crops. Barillot et al., present CN-Wheat, a comprehensive and mechanistic model of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) metabolism within...