Engineering the plant circadian clock for latitudinal adaptation as a strategy to secure agricultural productivity on...

Climate change is driving droughts, floods, heatwaves, and new diseases impacting different crop species in different parts of the globe. However, these are local symptoms of a global disease that is also causing planet-wide changes that threaten food production. Warming-induced shifts in climatic niches, including the rapid poleward migration of our most productive agricultural zones, are necessitating the creation of medium to high latitude-adapted germplasm for staple crops. Advances in plant chronobiology and crop population genomics show that core clock genes played a historically serendipitous role in adapting major crops to new latitudes during the process of domestication and breeding. In this Tansley insight, we argue that rapid latitudinal adaptation of crops in the future is possible via the targeted engineering of morning-, afternoon-, and evening-expressed circadian regulators in crop plants with distinct phenologies. We envision a latitudinal breeding pipeline incorporating knowledge from multi-location crop population genomics studies and harnessing gene editing and synthetic biology to rapidly prototype climate-smart varieties and speed up the de novo domestication of crop wild relatives. Building a climate-smart agricultural system requires engineering plant chronobiology to reach the ambitious goal of creating germplasm adapted for greater seasonal and geographical flexibility.