What does it all mean and what are the main challenges that we should all be working on solving? Herein, I present my personal perspective on what the immediate questions and the biggest longer-term issues in plant science are. What are the next big questions in plant physiology, and plant biology in general, and what avenues of research should we be investigating and training students in for the next decade? As a plant scientist surrounded by like-minded individuals, I hear a lot of ideas that over time turn into buzz words, such as plant resilience, genotype-to-phenotype, data science, systems biology, biosensing, synthetic biology, neural networks, robustness, interdisciplinary training, new tool development, modeling, etc. The next-generation cultivars would have to withstand environmental contamination and a wider range of growth temperatures, soil nutrients and moisture levels and effectively deal with growing pathogen pressures to continue to yield well in even suboptimal conditions. An in-depth understanding of plant physiology is paramount to our ability to optimize current agricultural practices, to develop new crop varieties, or to implement biotechnological innovations in agriculture. Plant biology is a key area of science that bears major weight in the mankind's ongoing and future efforts to combat the consequences of global warming, climate change, pollution, and population growth.
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