Functional-Structural Plant Models Mission in Advancing Crop Science: Opportunities and Prospects.

Soualihou Soualiou,Zhiwei Wang,Brian Collins,Philippe De Reffye,Weiwei Sun,Youhong Song,Gaëtan Louarn

doi:10.3389/fpls.2021.747142

Abstract

Functional–structural plant models (FSPMs) have been evolving for over 2 decades and their future development, to some extent, depends on the value of potential applications in crop science. To date, stabilizing crop production by identifying valuable traits for novel cultivars adapted to adverse environments is topical in crop science. Thus, this study will examine how FSPMs are able to address new challenges in crop science for sustainable crop production. FSPMs developed to simulate organogenesis, morphogenesis, and physiological activities under various environments and are amenable to downscale to the tissue, cellular, and molecular level or upscale to the whole plant and ecological level. In a modeling framework with independent and interactive modules, advanced algorithms provide morphophysiological details at various scales. FSPMs are shown to be able to: (i) provide crop ideotypes efficiently for optimizing the resource distribution and use for greater productivity and less disease risk, (ii) guide molecular design breeding via linking molecular basis to plant phenotypes as well as enrich crop models with an additional architectural dimension to assist breeding, and (iii) interact with plant phenotyping for molecular breeding in embracing three-dimensional (3D) architectural traits. This study illustrates that FSPMs have great prospects in speeding up precision breeding for specific environments due to the capacity for guiding and integrating ideotypes, phenotyping, molecular design, and linking molecular basis to target phenotypes. Consequently, the promising great applications of FSPMs in crop science will, in turn, accelerate their evolution and vice versa.

Highlights

Global human population is growing rapidly and has been estimated to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050
It is known that the major strength in Functional–structural plant models (FSPMs) is the fine simulation of explicit plant morphogenesis, 3D architecture, and architectural development; the key functional parts in many FSPMs are, to some extent, based on or adopted from the physiological processes used in conventional crop models, in particular, in the beginning when to illustrate the role of FSPMs by integrating both the plant architecture and physiological functions (De Reffye et al, 2009), which is still widely used
Crop science is confronted with the challenge for substantial improvement of crop productivity under climate change for increased human population

Summary

Introduction

Global human population is growing rapidly and has been estimated to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. Such models based on concepts rooted in robust system biology and open frameworks that allow integrating knowledge of plant behaviors and research hypothesis (Yin and Struik, 2010; Hammer et al, 2016) and will be useful for studying the interaction of genotypes and environments (G × E) precisely and decoding complex traits (Messina et al, 2015).

Results

Conclusion