BLOGPOSTS

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Where Science Meets Soil: How C-SPIRIT’s Aim 5 Puts Resilience to the Test

By Ashley Stender | October 31, 2025 In C-SPIRIT’s six-aim research pipeline, each discovery builds on the last, moving step by step toward real-world impact. That transition from controlled environments to working farms defines Aim 5: Lab and Field Testing, led by Dr. Addie Thompson at Michigan State University. Her team connects the molecular breakthroughs of Aims 1-4 with the field-scale experiments that reveal how those insights perform in living crops. By testing bioactive compounds under authentic growing conditions, Aim 5 helps turn discovery into resilience that boosts crop productivity and, ultimately, stabilizes our food supply. “It’s really about taking…

Growing the Future: C-SPIRIT’s Role in Building a Sustainable Bioeconomy

By Ashley Stender | September 25, 2025 Rethinking Agriculture in a Warming World The bioeconomy promises to harness biological resources to drive growth, resilience, and sustainability. The stakes are high, because farming today is already strained by hotter growing seasons, unpredictable rainfall, and more frequent climate shocks such as droughts and floods. Since 1961, global agricultural productivity growth has slowed by about 21 percent, with the steepest declines in Africa at 34 percent and in Latin America and the Caribbean at 26 percent (Ortiz-Bobea et al., 2021). Food security is also worsening. In 2023, about 733 million people (roughly one…

Making it Work: How C-SPIRIT’s Aim 4 Synthesizes Bioactive Compounds for Sustainable Agriculture

By Ashley Stender | September 2, 2025 Natural products are produced by living organisms to help them adapt and survive in their environments. Many natural products are celebrated for their potential to repel pests, fight fungi, and trigger beneficial plant responses. But discovery alone isn’t enough. To be used in agriculture, these molecules must be made in quantity, sustainably, and affordably, which remains an enduring challenge in plant science and synthetic biology. C-SPIRIT’s Aim 4: Biological Synthesis of Bioactive Compounds tackles this problem directly by developing ways to produce natural products, or bioactive compounds, in plant and microbial hosts. “In…

Decoding the Blueprint: How C-SPIRIT’s Aim 3 Maps the Genetics of Plant Chemistry

By Ashley Stender | July 30, 2025 When plants face drought, heat, and other stressors, they activate a complex network of genes to survive. These genetic responses include the production of specialized metabolites, which are compounds that help defend, signal, or coordinate the plant’s biochemical response to stress. But which genes switch on these pathways, and how does the plant decide when and where to make them? C-SPIRIT’s Aim 3: Gene and Pathway Discovery explores how plants control the production of stress-responsive compounds at the genetic level. By identifying which genes turn on, where, and under what conditions, Aim 3…

From Data to Discovery: How C-SPIRIT Is Transforming Metabolite Annotation

By Ashley Stender | June 23, 2025 Over 95% of compounds found in plant and microbial studies remain structurally and functionally undefined. Despite techniques like liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS) producing enormous volumes of chemical data, this data remains largely uninterpreted, leaving the majority of these natural products unanalyzed and unused and creating a significant bottleneck in discovering novel bioactive products from plant and microbial sources. C-SPIRIT’s Aim 2: Metabolite Annotation and Database Development seeks to change that. The initiative focuses on three tightly connected goals: 1) building the first comprehensive annotation framework for plant and microbial metabolites, 2) designing high-throughput…

Where It All Starts: Inside C-SPIRIT’s Bioactive Molecule Discovery Pipeline

By Ashley Stender | May 27, 2025 Harsh environmental conditions such as heat and drought significantly compromise crop yields. In the face of a rapidly growing world population and shrinking agricultural land, strengthening agricultural resilience has become both a scientific and global priority. But what if nature’s mechanisms to improve crop response to environmental stresses already exist, just waiting to be discovered? Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation as a Global Center, the Center for Sustainable Plant Innovation and Resilience through International Teamwork (C-SPIRIT) was created to address the challenges that unstable environmental conditions pose to global food security.…