Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Prolonged and intensive breeding of wheat has produced varieties that would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. Such artificial selection can risk prioritizing traits of value to producers over those of importance to consumers. So is there evidence that crop improvement has left modern wheat nutritionally impoverished?
Climate change will pose diverse challenges for pollination this century. Identifying and addressing these challenges will help to mitigate impacts, and avoid a scenario whereby plants and pollinators are in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’.
The need for GM crops is growing rapidly as a consequence of the overriding priority for the sustainable generation of vastly increased food production. Although demands for energy and raw materials from the bioeconomy remain, they may become eclipsed by the quest for more food.
Transgenic biotechnology offers great opportunities for food security. But the potential effects on human health and the environment are a major concern to the public, which hinders the application of the technology. Along with continually implementing rigid biosafety assessment, educating the public is critical for promoting transgenic crops in China.
Boosted by next-generation sequencing technology, there is now an ever-growing list of fully sequenced plant genomes. Recent additions to this list are two presumed ancestors of Petunia hybrida, the most popular bedding plant worldwide. These genome sequences provide new information on a species at a key position in plant phylogeny, and support the use of petunia as a research model plant species.
Sustainable intensification is a concept of growing importance, yet it is in danger of becoming scientifically obsolete because of the diversity of meanings it has acquired. To avoid this, it is important to consider the various scales on which it can aid progress towards feeding human populations while also protecting the environment.
The world's ecosystems are losing biodiversity fast. A satellite mission designed to track changes in plant functional diversity around the globe could deepen our understanding of the pace and consequences of this change, and how to manage it.
