Color-Coding Crops for Climate Change

G reen is the color of growth in the plant world. From an aerial view, most farms blanket the land in quilts of varying shades of green. But what if the stems and leaves of your average corn, barley, and rice plants were hairy and blue instead? One team of scientists thinks it could help make farms more sustainable.

Here’s why. Climate change is placing stressors on traditional crops. Many wild varieties are more resilient to environmental shifts, more efficient at nutrient and water use, and more nutrient-dense. So some breeders recommend editing the genomes of wild varieties that already have these desired stress resistance and nutritional qualities to increase their yields and palatability. But the new crops would present a challenge for weeding—they would be difficult to distinguish from their wild and weedy counterparts, especially at early stages in their growth.

Michael Palmgren, a biologist at Copenhagen University, says we could solve this secondary problem by also altering the plants’ genomes to express certain pigments already found in many plants—such as anthocyanins, which make blueberries blue, or carotenoids, which make carrots orange—as well as novel textures. This would make it easier for farm robots to visually distinguish them from weeds—without resorting to toxic herbicides.

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