The Large Hadron Collider, a.k.a. CERN, found success in a simple idea: Invest in a laboratory that no one institution could sustain on their own and then make it accessible for physicists around the world. Astronomers have done the same with telescopes, while neuroscientists are collaborating to build brain imaging observatories. Now, in Trends in Plant Science on January 5, agricultural researchers present their vision for how a similar idea could work for them.
Rather than a single laboratory, the authors want to open a network of research stations across Europe--from a field in Scotland to an outpost in Sicily. Not only would this provide investigators with easy access to a range of different soil properties, temperatures, and atmospheric conditions to study plant/crop growth, it would allow more expensive equipment (for example, open-field installations to create artificial levels of carbon dioxide) to be a shared resource.
"Providing sufficient food to 9.2 billion people by 2050 in a changing climate will be a major challenge. An efficient translation of basic plant science to field applications is imperative to achieve this grand goal." Prof Dirk Inzé (VIB/UGent)
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