infocus #66 June 2022 A Novel Horizontally Mounted Confocal Microscope Provides New Insights into Plant Development
One of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st century is to sustainably feed nine to ten billion people by the year 2050, while
simultaneously attempting to reduce the environmental impact of food production.
Some options that have been proposed to address these challenges include closing the yield gap (i.e making the difference between attempted and attained yields smaller) and increasing the production potential of crops, largely through the use of new technologies and investing in research in the plant sciences field (Smith and Gregory, 2013). Thus, a crucial overarching aim of the plant sciences is the ability to ‘futureproof’ crops, i.e. use a combination of molecular breeding and genetic techniques to generate elite crop varieties that are able to withstand environmental stresses such as increased CO2 levels as well as water and nutrient scarcity, factors which strongly constrain plant growth in soil (Kissoudis, 2016).
