Copyright: © 2023 Clarke, Ronald. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: JC is a current paid employee of the Public Library of Science.

Bioengineering of plants, soil, and the microbes that live among them has been put forward as one possible way to mitigate the effects of climate change. Although using biotechnology to engineer plants for resilience to a changing environment is not new [1], as the threat of climate change grows [2], so too must the attention we give to potential solutions. This issue of PLOS Biology therefore features a collection of articles that examine the prospect of engineering the plants we rely on to help them adapt to a changing climate. They focus on 2 major issues: creating climate-resilient varieties and increasing the carbon-capture potential of croplands.

The ongoing challenge of feeding a growing population in a socioeconomically and environmentally appropriate manner has put a spotlight on plant breeding. In this issue, Flint-Garcia and colleagues [3] highlight the potential of transferring beneficial traits (such as resistance to pests or drought tolerance) from wild relatives of crops to modern cultivars, while avoiding less desirable traits (such as small yields or tough seed coats). In a related approach, McNally and Henry discuss the success of the 3,000 Rice Genomes Project [4] and present tools that can be used to analyze the International Rice Genebank for genes that confer climate resilience [5]. But discovering the right genes and transferring these genes to or editing these genes in crops is only the beginning of the process. Being able to reach markets with engineered plants that have the desired traits requires buy-in from farmers, national breeding programs, agritech companies (discussed by Feuillet and Eversole [6]), and policy makers, as well as public support (discussed by Archibald and colleagues [7]).

One molecular target for engineering is photosynthesis, which is attractive because its enhancement holds the dual promise of increasing plant yields and capturing more atmospheric carbon [8]. In a Perspective, Matthews looks at the current state of photosynthesis engineering and discusses what could be achieved if current experimental approaches are successful [9]. Alamos and Shih explore the idea of engineering plants for increased carbon capture by examining the role of synthetic biology in plant engineering and how knowledge gained from efforts to engineer photosynthesis can be applied to the challenge of engineering root systems [10]. Fierer and Walsh discuss how soil and root microbiomes could be manipulated to increase soil carbon sequestration in croplands and address the question of whether we can increase carbon persistence in the soil [11].