On Wednesday February 24, 2021, Plant-RX, Plantum and the TKI Horticulture and Starting Materials organized an online symposium.

Plant-RX is a national initiative in the Netherlands to establish a long-term research program on plant resilience. The use of resilient crops is an important cornerstone for sustainable agriculture. Resilient plant varieties are able to continue productivity even when challenged with unfavorable and fluctuating environmental conditions or plant diseases.

The complexity of plant resilience severely hinders fundamental understanding, and also limits practical application in crop breeding. A powerful new scientific approach is needed to unravel the mechanisms underlying resilience, their potential trade-offs and their effects on agronomically relevant traits. The challenge is the translation of big data obtained in large-scale experiments to understanding the biology of resilience, a major gap that Plant-RX envisions to close. For this, a novel systems approach will be developed to link data analysis and bioinformatics to mechanistic modeling using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches.

Through this symposium participants were given a view of the state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in plant science and breeding, and informed about new developments, pitfalls and limitations, and opportunities.

The symposium was followed by a matchmaking meeting for the Plant-RX initiative, (see below the program for more details).