Plants are facing a critical challenge: Adapt to our rapidly changing climate or die. For some plants, that means adapting to hotter temperatures and less water. For others, it's about the availability of nutrients in changing soils.

From our human perspective, we desperately need food and bioenergy crops to keep up with climate change.

Scientists might be able to help nudge plants in the right direction with genetic engineering and synthetic biology, but first they've got to understand what's going on in the rhizosphere—the system that includes a plant's roots, the surrounding soil and all the microbes, nutrients and chemicals that exist within that soil.

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[Phys.org, 2023.9.1, https://phys.org/news/2023-09-qa-molecular-recipe-climate-change-resistant.html]