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December is traditionally a time for looking back at the year that has passed. For plant biology, drought has been a frequently raised topic in 2024 — and 2025 is unlikely to be any different.
The Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) is a global movement, launched in 2023, to improve human nutrition in the face of a changing climate and degraded lands. VACS emphasizes an integrated approach to investments in crops and soils, concentrating on the potential of traditional and indigenous ‘opportunity crops’. VACS also addresses priorities, including climate change and drought, biodiversity, soil fertility, gender equality and women’s empowerment, water, sanitation and health.
The functions of many genes in model plants are unknown. Traditional methods to infer function are showing their limitations, but other approaches are emerging.
With an increasing ability to understand the complexity of living systems, it becomes more and more evident that well-defined canonical functions of proteins and complexes are intertwined.
The development of high-yielding, resilient cultivars is the primary goal of many crop breeding programmes, but the uptake of these new cultivars is persistently low in low-income countries. We discuss constraints related to the adoption of crop cultivars and stress the importance of participatory approaches in building trust and promoting the adoption of new technologies.
