Using plant biology to address climate change

The impact of our changing climate on agriculture and food security—and how contemporary agriculture contributes to climate change—is at the forefront of the flagship projects of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Climate Grand Challenges competition. The project, 'Revolutionising agriculture with low-emissions, resilient crops' led by Christopher Voigt, is one of five flagship winners in the Climate Grand Challenges competition. Mary Gehring, a 2021 principal investigator in the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) and associate professor of biology, forms part of the team and will lead one of the research's sub-projects, 'Developing clonal seed production to fix hybrid vigor', which aims to enable food crop plants to create seeds that are both more robust and genetically identical to the parent—and thereby able to pass beneficial traits from generation to generation.