Mission
The mission of the Plant Resilience Institute (PRI) is to enhance plant resilience to environmental challenges including extremes in weather and to become a “Center of Excellence” for foundational and translational plant research aimed at stabilizing the productivity and quality of food and energy crops against climate fluctuations and uncertainties.
Purpose
Climate instability threatens agricultural productivity. Stabilizing crop production will require the development of crops that are more resistant to abiotic and biotic stresses including drought, high temperature, flooding, disease (bacterial, fungal, viral) and insect pests.
People
The PRI includes faculty, postdocs, students, and staff from diverse career stages and disciplines (biochemistry, genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, microbiology, and pathology), with expertise in both model and crop species, drought and heat adaptation, plant-microbe and plant-insect interactions, microbial ecology, and genomics.
News
MSU’s New Plant and Environmental Sciences Building Critical to Advancing Climate-Resilient Plants
The Plant and Environmental Sciences Building (PESB) is officially under construction, accelerating climate-critical discoveries and advancing MSU’s excellence in food security. PESB will be the home of PRI when construction is complete in 2026.
MSU Awarded One of the NSF’s Six Global Centers to Solve Worldwide Food Challenges
PRI has been granted an NSF 2024 Global Centers award! The International Research Center for Enhancing Plant Resilience addresses the critical challenge of stabilizing global food production amid unpredictable weather patterns.
MSU Trustees Approve Construction of New Plant and Environmental Sciences Building
The new building will promote cross-disciplinary collaborations by housing research teams from both PRI and the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory.