Plants roots take up water and nutrients from the soil, in addition to providing mechanical anchorage. Root function is crucial for high agricultural production and root related traits have been identified as breeding targets to meet current climatic and nutritional challenges.

Plants have evolved many strategies to cope with low nutrient availability and drought. We study the root system architecture, the root anatomy, the molecular processes and the root rhizosphere processes and biota to understand these strategies. Highlights from our recent work include:

• Phenotyping the variation of root traits among crops and genotypes (e.g. https://www.wishroots-ejpsoil.net/)
• Testing how crop roots use alternative fertilizers made off algae biomass
• Demonstrating how specific rhizosphere bacteria can enhance plant growth, by dissecting plant molecular mechanisms
• Discovering viruses which kill harmful bacteria and protect the plant
  

Since soil is a complex ecosystem characterized by many biological, chemical and physical processes, understanding foraging strategies by roots requires an integrated approach. We develop models which simulate root growth and soil processes and use them to understand the critical steps. Recent highlights from our modeling work are:

• Discovering new traits that are important to P uptake in rice
• Modelling of the interaction between nitrifying bacteria, plant roots and nitrogen loss in the soil
• Quantification of the importance of many root traits for the uptake of nutrients in different environments
• Development of a mobile phone app which, in the background, uses a model to predict water needs of a cassava crop