Jesse Lasky has spent more than 15 years studying how plants adapt to their environments, and on this United Nations International Day for Biological Diversity, the Penn State associate professor of biology has a message for farmers and scientists alike: evolution holds the blueprint for crops that can weather the storms ahead.
The world's crops face unprecedented pressure. Environments are changing faster than ever, threatening the plants we depend on for food and survival. But Lasky and researchers like him are discovering that nature has already solved many of the problems we're racing to address. Plants have been evolving and adapting to new conditions for millennia—without human intervention. The key is learning to read and apply those lessons before climate shifts, new pests, or extreme weather devastate our harvests.
Plant breeding is, in essence, a form of guided evolution. Historically, breeders worked without molecular data, relying on observable traits and intuition. But that's changing. By understanding how plants have naturally adapted across their evolutionary history, scientists can make smarter decisions about which varieties to cross and which traits to prioritize. "Ignoring the available information about how things have already evolved would be a waste of a resource," Lasky explains. In other words, why reinvent the wheel when billions of years of natural selection have already done much of the work?
This is where plant genomics—the study of an organism's complete DNA and how it functions—becomes revolutionary. For millennia, plant breeders developed crop varieties suited to different environments without ever sequencing a single gene. But genomic data dramatically speeds up the process. Gene banks around the world contain thousands of crop varieties, vast repositories of genetic diversity carefully collected and preserved. Using traditional breeding methods to identify which plants carry traits useful for specific environments would require growing enormous numbers of plants under controlled conditions and measuring countless characteristics. That takes years. With genomic analysis, researchers can sequence the genomes in these collections and identify the exact DNA sequences associated with adaptation to particular climates. Suddenly, the solution is knowable before a single seed is planted.
The stakes are urgent. If a region experiences a sudden shift in temperature or rainfall, or if a new pest emerges, farmers need resistant varieties fast—sometimes within years, not decades. Plant genomics offers a faster, more efficient pathway to exploit the genetic diversity already locked in seed collections worldwide, delivering solutions to agricultural challenges anywhere on the planet.
Lasky's lab and others are pushing further still, using artificial intelligence and bioinformatics—computer science applied to DNA analysis—to predict how plants will respond to climate stress. The work is intricate. While scientists understand how some genetic codes function straightforwardly, many aspects of genetic variation remain mysterious. Gene expression, the process that determines how much of a gene's product gets made, is controlled by DNA in ways that are still poorly understood. AI approaches can help untangle this complexity, revealing how genetic variations might influence a plant's ability to handle heat, drought, or other stressors.
This convergence of evolutionary biology, genomics, and artificial intelligence points toward a future where crop resilience isn't left to chance. Instead, it emerges from careful study of how plants have already adapted, decoded through cutting-edge science and delivered to farmers whose livelihoods depend on it.