From genes to policy: mission-oriented governance of plant-breeding research and technologies

Maria Gerullis; Roland Pieruschka; Sven Fahrner; Lorenz Hartl; Ulrich Schurr; Thomas Heckelei

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1235175

From genes to policy: mission-oriented governance of plant-breeding research and technologies

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Sep 4:14:1235175. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1235175. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Maria Gerullis^{1

2}, Roland Pieruschka³, Sven Fahrner³, Lorenz Hartl², Ulrich Schurr³, Thomas Heckelei⁴

Affiliations

¹ Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States.
² Wheat and Oat Breeding Research, Institute for Crop Science and Plant Breeding, Bavarian State Research Center for Agriculture, Freising, Germany.
³ Plant Sciences, Institute of Bio- and Geosciences 2, Jülich Research Centre, Jülich, Germany.
⁴ Institute for Food and Resource Economics, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.

Abstract

Mission-oriented governance of research focuses on inspirational, yet attainable goals and targets the sustainable development goals through innovation pathways. We disentangle its implications for plant breeding research and thus impacting the sustainability transformation of agricultural systems, as it requires improved crop varieties and management practices. Speedy success in plant breeding is vital to lower the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, increase crop resilience to climate stresses and reduce postharvest losses. A key question is how this success may come about? So far plant breeding research has ignored wider social systems feedbacks, but governance also failed to deliver a set of systemic breeding goals providing directionality and organization to research policy of the same. To address these challenges, we propose a heuristic illustrating the core elements needed for governing plant breeding research: Genetics, Environment, Management and Social system (GxExMxS) are the core elements for defining directions for future breeding. We illustrate this based on historic cases in context of current developments in plant phenotyping technologies and derive implications for governing research infrastructures and breeding programs. As part of mission-oriented governance we deem long-term investments into human resources and experimental set-ups for agricultural systems necessary to ensure a symbiotic relationship for private and public breeding actors and recommend fostering collaboration between social and natural sciences for working towards transdisciplinary collaboration.

Keywords: automated phenotyping technologies; governance; plant phenotyping; research policy; sustainability goals.

Grants and funding

MG, TH and US are partially funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy - EXC 2070 – 390732324- PhenoRob. MG is also funded at Cornell University under the USDA Project number 1218256. US, SF, RP are supported by the EU funded project EMPHASIS-GO under Grant Agreement No. 101079772, the project AgroServ under the Grant Agreement No. 101058020, the project PHENET under the Grant Agreement No. 101094587. LH receives funding from Bavarian State Ministry for Food, Agriculture, and Forestry. This work was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of the University of Bonn and Cornell University.