How Many Genes is Too Many? Breeding Crops to Withstand the Elements

By Jenny Montooth

It might come as a surprise, but many of the plants in a typical salad actually have more genes than you do. That doesn’t make them more complex than humans, but it does show that they are built for adaptability.

Plants can’t move when conditions change. Instead, they rely on their genetic diversity to adapt to shifts such as climate change, pest outbreaks, soil variation, and changing farming practices. But with these factors constantly in flux, plant breeders face an almost impossible task: improving crops for current conditions without limiting their ability to adapt to unpredictable conditions in the future. As breeders work to improve how plants perform, their target is constantly moving.

Part of the challenge lies in the biology itself. Plants have evolved a wide range of genetic traits to survive in different environments. While these traits can be beneficial under certain conditions, they don’t act in isolation. Instead, they interact in complex ways with each other and with the environment. This is known as gene–environment interaction, where factors like weather, soil conditions, and pests influence how genes are expressed. Together, these interactions shape a plant’s traits, making it difficult to pinpoint which genes are actually driving success in any given environment.

A new follow-up study from researchers at Corteva Agriscience explores this challenge, showing that the way we organize breeding programs can shape not just how quickly crops improve, but how well they keep up with a changing world.

This study builds on earlier work by the same research team, which explored why traditional breeding programs that have often been decentralized and reliant on a small number of elite plant lines have been so successful. That work showed that narrowing the range of genetic possibilities can actually help breeders make progress when dealing with complex genetics. The new study takes this idea a step further, asking what happens when those strategies are applied in a constantly changing environment.