Climate change and the current growth in the world’s population constitute unprecedented challenges for food security. In such a context, optimization of food security by increasing yield and decreasing loses is mandatory for a sustainable production and supply, and it is one of the central topics within most Governments’ agendas around the world. An effective way of achieving such sustainability relies on enhancing natural plant defense in order to diminish pest-related loses, but unfortunately, strong immune responses are detrimental to plant growth affecting yield production. Despite of intense efforts in trying to understand both plant growth and defense separately, very little is known about the molecular basis of that trade-off.

This B·Debate, an initiative of Biocat and “la Caixa” Foundation, is co-organized with the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG). Its main goal is to bring together renowned scientists working in plant development and defense, as well as experts on the incipient merging of both disciplines, which will provide new promising approaches to better understand stress-development trade-offs. This interdisciplinary meeting will cover the topics of plant-pathogen co-evolution and adaptation, hormone and signaling cascades, chromatin modifications and genome dynamics, cell biology and molecular single-cell approaches, among others.”