University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gets $5 million grant to model crops

In Illinois, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Crops in silico (Cis) project has received a $5 million grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) to continue building a computational platform that integrates multiple models to study a whole plant virtually. Developing crops using traditional methods is research, labor and cost intensive. However, Cisallows researchers to quickly determine and test characteristics that help crops thrive in specific environments. This modeling allows researchers to conduct more experiments than can be realistically achieved in a field. With Cis, billions of possible changes and combinations of changes can be tested to achieve more productive and sustainable crops in different environments.