Research

Plants are a unifying factor in the solution to current major challenges such as climate crisis, dangerous levels of global pollution, the collapse of biodiversity, and resource scarcity to feed and support life for a growing world population. Furthermore, plant biomass is the only sizable and renewable material resource on Earth, accounting for approximately 80% of the Earth’s biomass. The importance of plants to our planet and well-being underlies the need for more research in plant science to understand how plants develop and function and, in turn, how the physics and chemistry of plant-based biomass may be used for human societies and man-made technologies.

This proposal is motivated by the identification of a major knowledge gap in our understanding: the role of plant mechanobiology in directing how plants reproduce, grow, develop, and construct their materials, and interact with their environment, and how this understanding can be translated into improved plant propagation and performance in the face of the major challenges that we face. This programme will consolidate the position of the Netherlands as an international nexus in plant mechanobiology, plant breeding, propagation, and green tissue engineering.

The programme runs the gamut from fundamental to translational research and creates a consortium of trans-, inter-, and multidisciplinary experts in plant biology, mechanobiology, physics, and state-of-the-art analytics, chemistry, and material science. GreenTE will revolutionize our knowledge of plant mechanobiology, leverage this knowledge to create novel translational opportunities for green tissue engineering, and forge a community of academic researchers and industrial stakeholders to train a new generation of young researchers to adopt a multidisciplinary scientific intuition, enabling them to tackle the interdisciplinary challenges in plant sciences of the future.