Challenges of translating Arabidopsis insights into crops

In defense of funding foundational plant science

Plants are essential for life as we know it on Earth. They oxygenate the atmosphere, regulate the climate, and comprise much of the primary producers underpinning complex food systems. In the 1980s, a multinational group of plant scientists chose the small angiosperm-Arabidopsis thaliana-to serve as the model flowering plant for genetic and molecular studies that would be leveraged to produce vast new datasets, resources, and tools. The rationale they used to persuade funding agencies to make significant investments and focus intense effort on this single plant species was to produce a deep fundamental knowledge of the biology of plants and to apply this knowledge to valuable, but typically less tractable, plant species. Over the past 40 yr, Arabidopsis has emerged as the most powerful and versatile plant model to uncover core biological principles and served as a prototyping system to test advanced molecular and genetic concepts. We argue that the emerging challenges of accelerating climate instability and a rapidly growing global population call for renewed and robust investments in fundamental plant biology research. Leveraging the power of Arabidopsis research, resources, datasets, and global collaborative community is more important than ever. This commentary lays out a vigorous defense of foundational, i.e. "basic," plant science research; describes that often, Arabidopsis is preferable to working directly in crops; highlights several transformative applications generated from basic plant research; and makes the argument that plant science is vital to the survival of humanity.