2 June 2025
Developing more productive, resilient and sustainable plants
We’re funding nine teams of researchers all aiming to lay the foundation for developing more productive, resilient, and sustainable plants.
We have announced £62.4m in funding for nine teams of researchers who are aiming to lay the foundation for developing more productive, resilient, and sustainable plants. The world's population is projected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, which will require agricultural production to increase by approximately 70%. Achieving an increase in food production on this scale will require a new generation of crops with far greater productivity and resilience. Our Synthetic Plants programme will explore the fundamental scientific and technical approaches required to support long-term innovation and growth in a sector that accounts for 4% of global GDP.
“Synthetic biology has already advanced our capabilities in healthcare. Now, we’re investing in its potential to deliver similar breakthroughs for agriculture,” says Programme Director Angie Burnett. “We’re balancing deep scientific expertise with fresh, interdisciplinary perspectives, and teams will be thinking about how to translate the science into real-world impact. This work could improve food security, reduce agriculture’s environmental impact, and potentially create new products that can be delivered at speed and scale in the future.”
This programme is focused on creating systems that allow scientists to safely design, build, and deliver genetic instructions into plant chloroplasts and chromosomes. If successful, this work will:
- Enable us to equip plants with improved traits and characteristics such as enhanced photosynthesis, disease resistance, and higher yield – improvements that current methods make costly, time-consuming, and difficult to achieve;
- Advance public trust and responsible adoption by integrating social science and public engagement at the core of the programme.
To achieve these goals, we’ll need to solve some of the biggest barriers in plant science, from developing robust technical platforms to navigating ethical and social complexity. In the programme’s first three years, teams will focus on the potato to enable the rapid exchange of knowledge and skills. The potato was chosen for its (a) well-documented amenability to laboratory manipulation, including efficient DNA introduction; (b) extensive genomic data, and (c) global significance as the foremost non-cereal staple crop, playing a vital role in UK and global food security. Successful approaches will then be expanded to a wider range of essential crops, such as wheat.
The programme brings together researchers from across the UK, and has attracted world-leading researchers from Germany, Spain, Canada, the US, and Australia, to build within UK centres of excellence.
Projects fall across two key technical areas:
Technical Area 1: designing, building, and delivering synthetic chromosomes and synthetic chloroplasts – example projects:
- A new international partnership, in which researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the University of Essex, UC Berkeley, Constructive Bio, and Camena Bioscience are teaming up to develop a universal platform for designing and assembling chloroplast genomes across multiple crop species;
- A team at the University of Cambridge, Macquarie University, and Australian Genome Foundry will be laying the foundations for delivering large and complex sets of chromosomes into crop plants, exploring how these techniques could enhance plant characteristics.
Technical Area 2: Addressing the social and ethical considerations around synthetic plant technologies – example project:
- Social scientists from the universities of Edinburgh, Exeter, and Sussex are exploring the social, ethical, and ecological dimensions of plant synthetic genomics alongside the technical projects, engaging farmers, scientists, and the public to develop resources and approaches for responsible decision-making.
“Plants’ capacity to tolerate stress and uptake nutrients from the soil are determined by their chromosomes, the structures that contain genetic information. Optimising these traits could be the key to feeding the world’s growing population but historically, our ability to influence them has been limited,” says Jake Harris, Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge. “We’re working on a way to tackle this by building and delivering tailored DNA into synthetic plant chromosomes. This will enable us to enhance virtually any plant characteristic, bringing transformative benefits to our global food system and beyond.”