Predicting plant growth in naturally fluctuating conditions

迫切需要了解气候变化将如何影响自然和农业环境中的植物生长和发展。植物通过检测和响应环境条件来适应当地环境的生理和发育。每天(24小时)和季节的环境波动对植物的生长发育有深远的影响。植物对这些规律性变化的反应通常涉及生物钟。这是一种细胞计时器，它协调生理和发育与24小时一天，并对植物的生长、胁迫反应和适合性做出重要贡献，包括作物。我们对植物昼夜节律的许多知识及其益处来自于在受控(实验室)条件下的实验。相比之下，人们对田间种植植物的昼夜节律的调节和后果知之甚少。因此，我们在一个对预测作物和自然植物种群的生长和发展具有重要意义的领域存在着重大的知识缺口。获得这些知识将是理解当前和未来气候如何影响植物生长和作物表现的关键，因为每日和季节温度模式发生了变化。理解自然波动条件下昼夜节律的重要性是一个重大挑战。这个问题的复杂性，再加上大量但基本上未被探索的数据集的可用性，使得这个问题在利用人工智能的最新发展和评估其性能方面都具有吸引力。将其应用于田间种植的植物需要在昼夜节律、田间转录学和数据科学方面的专业知识。为了实现这一目标，我们组建了一个团队，其中包括Antony Dodd(John Innes Centre，JIC)在时间生物学方面的专业知识，Pirita Paajanen(JIC)在纯数学和数据科学方面的专业知识，以及Hiroshi Kudoh(京都大学)在分子生态学方面的专业知识。通过这些专业知识的结合，我们将进一步了解气候变化引起的环境变化，如更温暖的夜晚和冬季，将如何影响植物昼夜节律的输出。为了利用我们的多学科合作，我们包括一套全面的研究人员交流，以允许联合工作和交叉培训，开发一个新的研究领域，具有相当大的潜力扩展到关于自然植物种群和作物的昼夜节律计划的问题。

There is an urgent need to understand how climate change will impact plant growth and development in natural and agricultural environments. Plants adapt their physiology and development to the local environment by detecting and responding to the environmental conditions. Daily (24 h) and seasonal environmental fluctuations have a profound impact on plant growth and development. Responses of plants to these regular changes often involve the circadian clock. This is a cellular timer that coordinates physiology and development with the 24 h day, and makes essential contributions to growth, stress responses and fitness of plants, including crops. Much of our knowledge of plant circadian rhythms and their benefits come from experiments in controlled (laboratory) conditions. In contrast, the regulation and consequences of circadian rhythms in field-grown plants are poorly understood. We thus have a major knowledge gap in an area that has great importance for predicting the growth and development of both crops and natural plant populations. Gaining this knowledge will be key for understanding how current and future climates, with altered daily and seasonal temperature patterns, impact plant growth and crop performance.Understanding the importance of circadian rhythms under naturally fluctuating conditions represents a major challenge. The complexity of this problem coupled with the availability of extensive yet largely unexplored datasets make this problem attractive both for exploiting the latest developments in AI, and evaluating their performance. Applying this to field-grown plants requires expertise in circadian regulation, field transcriptomics, and data science. To achieve this, we have assembled a team combining expertise of Antony Dodd (John Innes Centre, JIC) in chronobiology, Pirita Paajanen (JIC) in pure mathematics and data science, and Hiroshi Kudoh (Kyoto University) in molecular ecology. Through this combination of expertise, we will advance understanding of how environmental alterations caused by climate change, such as warmer nights and winters, will affect the outputs of plant circadian regulation. To harness our multidisciplinary collaboration, we include a comprehensive set of researcher exchanges to allow joint working and cross-training, developing a new research area with considerable potential for extension into questions about circadian programs in natural plant populations and crops.