Managing Plant Plasticity for Climate Resilient Crops

Development of new crop varieties, irrigation, and extensive application of fertilisers and pesticides underpinned the Green Revolution – all during a period of atypical climate stability. Crop yields have now plateaued, and the world faces a Grand Challenge to generate climate resilient crops for productive regions that are experiencing greater temperature fluctuations, and increased demand for finite phosphate and water resources.

Resilient crop plants will require a greater level of endogenous plasticity. We therefore need to understand the molecular basis of this plasticity, and generate a consistent conceptual and experimental framework for crop plants that integrates plant ontogeny with feedback loops between environmental signals, transcriptional genome regulation, metabolism and physiology.  

Some components of crop plasticity are coming into focus. Polyploidy underpinned the evolution of plants, with duplicated genes providing redundancy that facilitated adaptation to previous periods of climate change. Epigenetic mechanisms and variation superimposed on the genome appears to confer additional plasticity on the development of plants, and combine with hormonal, transcription factor and other signalling networks to mediate between Genotype and Environment (G x E).

Epigenetic regulation is associated with most plant developmental phases and transitions, and may be mapped onto the key stages of crop establishment, growth, floral initiation, pollination, seed set and maturation of harvestable product.

We propose that the epigenetic contribution to plasticity and GxE interactions should underpin development of new crop management strategies, both in terms of information-led agronomy and in harnessing epigenetic variation in crop breeding.