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The newly launched Diversity Seek initiative emphasizes the importance of state-of-the-art phenotypic and genotypic information. But to achieve its aims, it will also need to encourage the management of historical data, such as the metadata on the germplasm collections themselves.
Botany underpins the modern world, not only agriculture but medicine, material science, chemistry and much more. Yet it has been belittled to the point where even the name botany is out of favour; too outdated for a modern science. Thankfully botanical researchers continue to look forward, not back.
Consistent with their historical focus on the functional utility of plants, botanical gardens have an important opportunity to help ensure global food and ecosystem security by expanding their living collections, research and education programmes to emphasize agriculture and its impacts.
The majority of biological research is concentrated on a handful of species for valid practical reasons. But it is important that such pragmatism does not distort our view of life's complexity.
Arabidopsis has provided significant insights into the molecular workings of plants. Agriculturally aligned model grasses can be used to bridge the gap between this basic understanding of plant biology and real world challenges.
Synthetic biology could be seen as a natural development of traditional biotechnology and applied genetics. However, the exuberant culture that it has embraced should ensure it has a very bright future.