Plant breeding and genomics research partners at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama, shared news of their collaborative work with The Land Institute to domesticate new perennial grain crops to build climate resilience and biodiversity for global food systems.

Currently, 90% of the human diet comes from just 30 major food crops, including wheat, corn, and rice. This lack of crop biodiversity in global diets can leave the world vulnerable to increasingly variable weather, plant diseases, pests, and more. However, by looking to the thousands of underutilized edible plant species in the world, especially perennial crops that The Land Institute and partners work to develop, we can develop new food crops with the ability to address these challenges while also feeding people, providing drought tolerance in agriculture, and reducing water pollution from fertilizer runoff.

Between HudsonAlpha’s genomic expertise and The Land Institute’s decades-long work in perennial agriculture, our teams are working to accelerate the pace of perennial grain crop development and improvement to uncover the genetic potential of wild and lesser-known plants. This work also builds accessible methods and tools that enable other research institutions in this movement to contribute their own knowledge to this participatory process.