Released February 5, 2010
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Jonathan Lynch gets to the root of things. A professor of horticulture at Penn State, Lynch believes that understanding plant root architecture may be the key to producing enough food to feed the world’s expanding population.
"One of the main problems (in global agriculture) is low yields of plants because of drought, low soil fertility and lack of access to fertilizer and irrigation in many parts of the world," he said. His research over the past 25 years with collaborators in the U.S., Asia, Latin America and Africa has shown that root architecture plays a critical role in determining plant yields under stressful soil conditions. Correlated with genetic information, root traits can be harnessed to create higher-yield varieties of important crops like corn, bean and soybean, he said. "We can then give farmers seeds which will do well in poor soils, without fertilizer and irrigation."
--continued on Penn State University news
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