A plant root pushing through a ploughed field is not just a mechanical act—it is a chemical conversation with the soil, and that conversation breaks down when the soil gets too hard. Soil compaction, often worsened by heavy machinery and drought, can slash crop yields by up to 75% and costs European agriculture billions of euros each year. While scientists know that roots sense extreme compaction via the gas ethylene, they do not understand how roots detect moderate hardness—which affects 25 million hectares of European soil. This project aims to fill that gap by testing a new idea: that roots use volatile chemical signals for medium compaction, but switch to purely mechanical sensing when pores become too small for gas exchange. If successful, the work could reveal the molecular switches that tell a root to stop growing or push deeper. That knowledge would help breeders engineer crops with roots that can penetrate compacted layers to reach deeper water, making farming more resilient to drought without requiring new machinery or chemicals. The research is fundamental plant biology, but its practical payoff—climate-resilient crops—is immediate and tangible.
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Soil compaction represents a major challenge facing modern agriculture. When combined with other stresses like drought, soil compaction can reduce crop yields by up to 75% and causes billions of Euros in losses annually. The GROUNDBREAKING project addresses how plant roots sense different levels of soil compaction and modify their growth. This Project builds on my recent discovery that root responses to a high level of soil compaction are controlled by the gaseous signal "ethylene" (Pandey et al., 2021, Science, Huang et al., 2022, PNAS). However, agriculture soils vary greatly in terms of their hardness. Europe, in addition to 36-million hectares of highly compacted soil, contains 25-million-hectares of soil prone to medium compaction. Therefore, discovering which signalling pathways control root sensing of low to medium and high to very high levels of soil compaction is vital for developing more climate resilient crops. I hypothesise that roots employ novel volatile signals to sense medium levels of soil compaction, and mechanical signalling pathways to sense very high level of soil compaction. The premise of this novel signalling paradigm is based on the size of volatile signalling molecules and soil pores that impact the ability of gaseous signals to diffuse through compacted soil. However, when soil pore size is too small to allow gaseous exchange for even small signals like ethylene, mechanical signalling will take over to control root responses in very highly compacted soil. The GROUNDBREAKING project will pioneer the characterisation of novel volatile and mechanical signalling pathways I have recently identified control root compaction responses, revealing their underlying molecular, cellular and tissue-scale mechanisms, then creating a new paradigm for root-soil signalling. To realise these ambitious goals, I will integrate interdisciplinary expertise in soil physics, state-of-the-art non-invasive imaging, cutting edge molecular biology and genetic approaches under natural soil conditions. The GROUNDBREAKING project is also very timely as the new knowledge generated about compaction responses will underpin efforts to engineer crop roots to grow deeper and access more reliable water resources.
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