Plants For Our Future

Plants form the basis of all food, fiber and fuel production on our planet. How plants will cope with a future bringing rapid climate change and accelerating human demands is uncertain. All plants will surely experience increased stress, whether it be poor soil quality, altered temperatures or attacks by pests.

Bond LSC plant scientists and their colleagues are uniquely suited for assessing these impacts and providing the plants and management tools needed to retain and maximize plant contributions to planet health and our quality of life. We bring together some of the world’s leading experts on plant responses to stresses, including drought, low soil nutrients, toxic pollutants, diseases and insects.

The intensely collaborative approach of the Bond LSC promotes cooperation among these plant experts as well as interactions with scientists working in animal and human systems, focusing on critical responses seen in all plant and animal cells.

Our plant scientists also gain access to novel tools by interacting with a wide range of experts in diverse research areas. They employ the latest imaging, computational, genomic and analytical methods to fully understand how plants cope with their environments. This accelerates plant improvement by genetic modification as well as conventional breeding, and is producing useful management approaches such as rapid analyses of plant tissue composition, precision agriculture, new genes for pest control, and soil amendments based on signaling between plants and microbes.