Anders Hafren

A striking global outlook change that manifested during the last decade is the reality of a changing climate and uncertainty of future. Sustainability and resilience are among the top priorities in plant science today, and for a reason. Despite that plants are master adapters to harsh environments and diseases through evolution and selection, this constellation does not apply to our food producing crops within an accelerated climate change frame. Thus, methods and knowledge of molecular mechanisms by which we can feasibly engineer our crops to meet these future challenges are urgently needed. Within this large global sustainability purpose, our predicted way to essential discoveries lies within the largely unknown lives of viruses and more precisely how they have learned through their amazing capacity for evolution to engineer their plant host. In particular, we hope that our focus on viral manipulations of plant resilience mechanisms may pave the way to climate, disease and virus resilient crops.