High-dimensionality of plant molecular modifications to unlock unseen benefits in plant performance

Musings that were inspired by a recent meeting (Sheffield, England)

Can we unlock unseen synergies in plant performance by combining modifications in a high-dimensional way? (image created in leonardo.ai)

We have been working for several years on high-dimensionality of global change factors, in other words: what happens when many of them act at the same time. Turns out that just the number of factors can explain quite a bit of the ecological effects, which came as quite a surprise.

More recently, I have been thinking about other fields as well. So, recently we wrote a paper about applying high-dimensionality to bring about positive change. The topic was restoration, and the question here becomes: can we unlock benefits by combining a larger number of management practices?

Because the issue is always the same. It is very difficult to do experiments that involve the simultaneous action of many factors because of the combinatorial explosion problem. This means that the more factors you have, the more combinations will result when you combine them, to a point that the experiments are not feasible to do, at least not in ecology.

Our work-around has been to ask a question that emphasizes the number of factors instead, and we do this by sampling factors at random from a pool of factors, creating a gradient of an increasing number of factors.

The question is, can we do this in other contexts as well?

So just this week I attended a meeting in Sheffield, UK, a Plants, People, Planet symposium supported by the New Phytologist Foundation and organized by a team around the wonderful Prof. Katie Field. During the first day of this meeting, there were several talks that reported on various ways to improve plant performance by genetic manipulation. Some talks were about stomatal density, some about the photosynthetic machinery on a more biochemical level, some talks were about root traits, some were about symbionts (mostly dealt with at the immediately preceding meeting, the ICOM12 in Manchester). They each, as is typical of science, focused on one particular aspect of the story. So this made me think, can we unlock some unseen benefits by combining these plant modifications, creating a gradient in plant modification and seeing how the resulting plants perform? Maybe there is an certain number of modifications, beyond which there are no further gains, in other words the effect reaches a plateau? Or maybe the gains keep increasing under the right set of conditions. Or maybe the degree of effort becomes too much for the marginal gains?

In essence, the x-axis would be the number of plant modifications, and the y-axis would be plant performance. One could also test about the effects of dissimilarity of the factors that were combined: is a set of more dissimilar factors more likely to unlock unseen benefits (and synergies) than factors that are more similar in their effects on the plant?

In theory this should be possible (but not an expert in this field at all), since people could just work on the plant stock created by others, of course after they had agreed on a crop plant or a couple on which to focus their efforts. Then, these modified plants could just be ‘handed around’, with each group adding their modification, and then passing the plant to the next group.

The goals could entail various different targets of plant performance, like higher yields under optimal conditions, or better performance under conditions of increasing climate impacts (extreme events, for instance), or others, such as benefiting soil biodiversity and soil health. It would also be interesting to examine trade-offs among these different goals, or if synergies are easier to reach for some goals than for others.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!