With a goal of advancing modern agriculture well into the future, scientists are hoping to bring an important voice to the conversation: the plants themselves. A $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will allow a collaborative team of researchers from the University of Arizona, Cornell University, the Boyce Thompson Institute, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to do that through the newly established Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS).
CROPPS will grow the emerging field of digital biology and develop new methods to observe, record, and control plant responses to their environment. The information these systems gather will be shared via networked, online databases – creating an “Internet of Living Things” – to help researchers support plant systems in a changing global climate.
“Plants are sending us signals and they’re telling us things,” says Rebecca Mosher, the lead investigator on the CROPPS-based project at the University of Arizona and an Associate Professor in its School of Plant Sciences. “Can we better interpret those signals to understand what they are doing and what they need?”
Through the NSF Science and Technology Center grant, University of Arizona will receive $3.5 million over the next five years to leverage expertise in molecular plant biology, data analytics to help plants report their experiences digitally in real time, and remote sensing technology, such as the robotic field scanner at the university’s Maricopa Agricultural Center.
The concept of the Internet of Things is not new. In fact, consumers have already integrated the technology into their daily lives, Mosher explains.
“Newer appliances like thermostats, refrigerators, and even microwaves are designed with built-in sensors that we can connect to our phones, allowing us to check in on things at home or even turn off the air conditioner or the lights from half a country away,” she says. “We want to apply that concept and technology to living plant systems.”
The information these systems gather will help researchers better understand how to manage nutrients and water, for example, and how microbes work with plants to help them grow. Eventually, such knowledge could help scientists improve crop management.
“This project represents a fundamental shift in how biologists study plants,” says Duke Pauli, Mosher’s colleague in the School of Plant Sciences. “For the first time, we will be able to communicate with plants, enabling us to explore how they respond to dynamic environments in which they did not evolve and potentially breed new plants for our changing environment.”
Mosher adds that she is most excited about the prospect of engineering new pathways for plants to communicate with their human counterparts.
“We want to develop systems to better understand what plants are telling us in their own language, for example, ‘This growth pattern means I’d like more nitrogen, please.'”