AUTHOR=Soualiou Soualihou , Wang Zhiwei , Sun Weiwei , de Reffye Philippe , Collins Brian , Louarn Gaëtan , Song Youhong TITLE=Functional–Structural Plant Models Mission in Advancing Crop Science: Opportunities and Prospects JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2021 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.747142 DOI=10.3389/fpls.2021.747142 ISSN=1664-462X ABSTRACT=

Functional–structural plant models (FSPMs) have been evolving for over 2 decades and their future development, to some extent, depends on the value of potential applications in crop science. To date, stabilizing crop production by identifying valuable traits for novel cultivars adapted to adverse environments is topical in crop science. Thus, this study will examine how FSPMs are able to address new challenges in crop science for sustainable crop production. FSPMs developed to simulate organogenesis, morphogenesis, and physiological activities under various environments and are amenable to downscale to the tissue, cellular, and molecular level or upscale to the whole plant and ecological level. In a modeling framework with independent and interactive modules, advanced algorithms provide morphophysiological details at various scales. FSPMs are shown to be able to: (i) provide crop ideotypes efficiently for optimizing the resource distribution and use for greater productivity and less disease risk, (ii) guide molecular design breeding via linking molecular basis to plant phenotypes as well as enrich crop models with an additional architectural dimension to assist breeding, and (iii) interact with plant phenotyping for molecular breeding in embracing three-dimensional (3D) architectural traits. This study illustrates that FSPMs have great prospects in speeding up precision breeding for specific environments due to the capacity for guiding and integrating ideotypes, phenotyping, molecular design, and linking molecular basis to target phenotypes. Consequently, the promising great applications of FSPMs in crop science will, in turn, accelerate their evolution and vice versa.