Plant Biologists Seek Solutions to Global Food Concerns

Plant scientists from U.S. institutions as well as representatives from government, industry, and professional societies converged in Bethesda, Maryland to begin a process of developing a 10-year plan to help improve global food security. Organized by the American Society of Plant Biologists, the meeting sought to recognize the potential of plant scientists in addressing food problems.

Participants identified food security and a need for second Green Revolution as critical issues. Concerns raised were for new model systems, expansion of transgenic technologies, and long term monitoring sites for agricultural environments. Moving beyond plant breeding in lieu of systems biology and synthetic biology was suggested to create designer plants that can withstand extreme environmental conditions or improve a food's nutritional quality.

"One of the major goals is to model and infer how plants really work, based on genomic information, in different environments," says Jim Carrington, president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Danforth Center press release is at http://www.danforthcenter.org/wordpress/?p=7124.