It is estimated that food production will need to increase by 70% to meet demands in 2050. At the same time, the rate of change of our atmosphere and climate pose significant threat to food security.
The food production challenge can be met, in part, by breeding and genetically enhancing crops to increase yield and water use efficiency in the face of suboptimal climatic conditions. However, improving specific plant traits is not an easy; each is based on the complex interactions among genetics, environment, and ecosystem.
Computational solutions to plant improvement
Crops in silico is a global scientific collaboration that aims to harness the great strides in understanding of plant function from genes to whole plants, to accelerate forward approaches to crop breeding and bioengineering.
The Crops in silico community is comprised of experts in experimentation, agronomy, physiology, phenotyping, modeling different plant processes, software development, and visualization
Our vision is to develop intuitive tools that enable integration of information from genome to phenome to ecosystem, spanning spatial and temporal scales, to capture the emergent properties of complex, nonlinear systems.
Our goal is to accelerate food production in a changing climate; primarily by guiding practical breeding, bioengineering and agronomy.
