Research

About Our Research

The Plant Resilience Institute, or PRI, at Michigan State University is a globally renowned laboratory and field research center for plant resilience.

As a Center of Excellence, PRI connects leading plant researchers and eminent interdisciplinary labs to address the challenges that climate change poses to food production and crop resilience. PRI is where future leaders of plant research are trained. These leaders will advance, advocate for, and prioritize the importance of plant resiliency in our society and the environment.

By focusing on convergent science, PRI provides the resources and platform for groundbreaking collaborations. The PRI faculty come from colleges, departments, and institutions across MSU, including:

• College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
• College of Natural Science
• Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB)
• Department of Entomology (ENT)
• Department of Microbiology, Genetics, & Immunology (MGI)
• Department of Plant Biology (PLB)
• Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences (PSM)
• MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL)
• W.K. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS)

PRI’s research excellence extends from basic science to agricultural improvements, integrating molecular, genetic, physiological, ecological, and computational approaches to understand the complex mechanisms of how plants respond to, resist, and tolerate environmental stresses. Emphasis is placed on mechanistic studies of stress tolerance, plant-microbe interactions, regulatory metabolites, and genotype x environment interactions. This research combines insights from both natural biological systems and crop species to inform agricultural improvement, environmental sustainability, and conservation goals. PRI also broadly uses non-model plant systems, allowing scientists to research critical biological questions that would not be possible to answer using a narrower range of study systems.

Flagship Research Projects

In 2025, the PRI faculty identified three flagship areas of research as part of a bold, multi-phase vision covering the next decade to address major agricultural challenges posed by climate change. Each unique initiative synergizes the collective knowledge, interest, and expertise of PRI labs and builds organically from their ongoing areas of excellence in research. Together, the flagship projects aim to make PRI a global hub for climate-resilient agriculture and systems-level plant science.

EWAS-PR

The Environmental Wide Association Study for Plant Resilience (EWAS-PR) flagship project aims to identify environmental variables that causally shape plant resilience in the field through an Environment-Wide Association Study (EWAS). By integrating dense environmental sensing, multi-site field trials, phenotyping, and genomics, the project will align breeding and management with environmental drivers to transform agriculture in a changing environment.

GLACIER

The Great Lakes Advanced Climate Impact & Experimental Research Center (GLACIER) will be an advanced research facility designed to investigate how crops and ecosystems in the upper Great Lakes region will respond to the environmental conditions projected for 2050-2100. This initiative will replicate future extreme climatic scenarios in the Midwest by constructing infrastructure like rainout shelters, heating arrays, and flooding platforms for controlled stress experiments with the goal of identifying resilience traits across diverse food crops.

PRIME

The Plant Resilience-Inducing Metabolite Effectors (PRIME) initiative seeks to identify a new class of regulatory metabolites and their nuclear signaling mechanisms that govern plant resilience. The project integrates bioinformatics, molecular genetics, protein structural prediction, and experimental validation to investigate the metabolites’ roles in gene regulation and stress response, positioning PRI as a global leader in this previously unexplored field.

Center-Level Research Initiatives

PRI continues to expand its impact on plant resilience research by coordinating and advancing large-scale, center-level research initiatives aimed at addressing global challenges in plant science and agricultural sustainability. PRI faculty play key leadership roles in several major research centers, including:

C-SPIRIT

C-SPIRIT, or the Center for Sustainable Plant Innovation and Resilience through International Teamwork, is an NSF Global Center with the mission to discover bioactive compounds that enhance plant and soil health while engaging industry partners and stakeholders to co-develop technology, promote sustainability, and build public trust. C-SPIRIT establishes a collaborative framework across five countries – the U.S., U.K., Canada, Japan, and Republic of Korea – to pool resources, expertise, and technologies for solving agricultural challenges.

GLBRC

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) is a DOE-funded Bioenergy Research Center led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison in collaboration with MSU and other partners to create biofuels and bioproducts that are economically viable and environmentally sustainable.

KBS LTAR and LTER

The W.K. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) is part of the USDA's LTAR network, established to develop national, long-term strategies for sustainable agricultural production. KBS LTAR research informs the design of cropping systems that balance future productivity needs with enhanced environmental performance and benefits to farmers and society.

The KBS Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) is part of the NSF LTER Network to advance sustainable and resilient agricultural ecosystems through integration of long-term scientific research, education, and engagement with stakeholders.

PCA

Plant Cell Atlas (PCA) is an NSF-funded grant to create a community resource that maps cellular and subcellular plant protein localization patterns, track the dynamic interactions between proteins, identify the molecular components of cellular substructures, discern complete states and transitions of specialized cell types, and integrate these disparate data points in order to generate testable models of cellular function. The PCA initiative includes plant science leaders from imaging, proteomics, genomics, nanotechnology, and data science from across the nation.

PMN

Plant Metabolic Network (PMN) is an NSF and DOE grant that aims to bring together biochemical pathway databases and research communities focused on plant metabolism. At the center of the PMN is PlantCyc, a public reference database containing pathways and their catalytic enzymes, compounds, and genes from many plant species.

SYNCORNET

SYNCORNET is a multi-institutional research project funded by ARPA-E focused on engineering synchronized nitrogen efficiency traits in corn agriculture. SYNCORNET will systemically address agricultural inefficiencies in corn across the entire growing season through precision trait engineering, creating more sustainable and nitrogen-efficient corn agroecosystems.

WALII

WALII, or the Water and Life Interface Institute, is an NSF grant that operates as a virtual research institute bringing together labs across the U.S. to study how life continues without water from the molecular level up to evolutionary levels. WALII members seek to understand the methods used to survive desiccation and rehydration and whether or not these strategies are similar for all organisms.