Predicting plant growth in naturally fluctuating conditions

There is an urgent need to understand how climate change will impact plant growth and development in natural and agricultural environments. Plants adapt their physiology and development to the local environment by detecting and responding to the environmental conditions. Daily (24 h) and seasonal environmental fluctuations have a profound impact on plant growth and development. Responses of plants to these regular changes often involve the circadian clock. This is a cellular timer that coordinates physiology and development with the 24 h day, and makes essential contributions to growth, stress responses and fitness of plants, including crops. Much of our knowledge of plant circadian rhythms and their benefits come from experiments in controlled (laboratory) conditions. In contrast, the regulation and consequences of circadian rhythms in field-grown plants are poorly understood. We thus have a major knowledge gap in an area that has great importance for predicting the growth and development of both crops and natural plant populations. Gaining this knowledge will be key for understanding how current and future climates, with altered daily and seasonal temperature patterns, impact plant growth and crop performance.

Understanding the importance of circadian rhythms under naturally fluctuating conditions represents a major challenge. The complexity of this problem coupled with the availability of extensive yet largely unexplored datasets make this problem attractive both for exploiting the latest developments in AI, and evaluating their performance. Applying this to field-grown plants requires expertise in circadian regulation, field transcriptomics, and data science. To achieve this, we have assembled a team combining expertise of Antony Dodd (John Innes Centre, JIC) in chronobiology, Pirita Paajanen (JIC) in pure mathematics and data science, and Hiroshi Kudoh (Kyoto University) in molecular ecology. Through this combination of expertise, we will advance understanding of how environmental alterations caused by climate change, such as warmer nights and winters, will affect the outputs of plant circadian regulation. To harness our multidisciplinary collaboration, we include a comprehensive set of researcher exchanges to allow joint working and cross-training, developing a new research area with considerable potential for extension into questions about circadian programs in natural plant populations and crops.