Plants 2025: From Seeds to Food Security

University of Manitoba, Canada;Dr. Dilantha Fernando, Department of Plant Science, is a professor, plant pathologist, and Dean at the University of Manitoba. Dilantha is an internationally renowned host-pathogen interaction (i.e., canola-blackleg, canola-Verticillium, canola-Sclerotinia, wheat-fusarium head blight) researcher specializing in the epidemiology and spread of the pathogen on canola and cereals (9186 citations; 51 H-Index; 147 i-10-Index; 203 publications). Prof. Fernando’s core research area is sustainable agricultural systems through disease management. Dilantha studies the host-pathogen interaction at the field and molecular level using traditional and advanced (omics) methods. Dilantha has been associated with the naming of R-genes in canola, introducing a new disease management strategy in Canada. Dilantha has trained 15 PhD students and 17 Masters students who have graduated and found excellent employment in academia, industry, and government research institutions. Dilantha is a frequent keynote and plenary speaker at conferences and grower meetings and sits on several boards nationally and internationally. In 2024, Dilantha was named a Fellow of the Canadian Phytopathological Society (CPS). In 2023, Dilantha received the highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Agricultural and Environmental Sustainability. In 2022, Dilantha was named a Fellow of the Asian PGPR Society. In 2021, Dilantha received the Merit Award for Excellence in Research and Service from the University of Manitoba. In 2020, Dilantha received the highest award for research the 2020 CPS Outstanding Research Award. In 2019, Dilantha was named a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society (APS), USA. Also, in 2019, Dilantha received the highest award for excellence in research on plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR). Dilantha is the founding editor-in-chief of Plants (MDPI) and sits on several other editorial boards in the world.

Instituto de Agrobiotecnología (IdAB) - CSIC, Spain;Fermín Morales Iribas holds a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Navarra (Spain) and a PhD in Sciences from the University of Zaragoza (Spain). He completed his PhD Thesis at the Experimental Station of Aula Dei (EEAD) of the Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC), under the direction of Drs. Javier Abadía and Anunciación Abadía, studying the changes induced by environmental stresses (iron deficiency, salinity, drought) in the photosynthetic apparatus of higher plants. After a brief stay in the laboratory of Prof. Peter Horton (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom), he carried out a postdoctoral stay of about three years in the laboratory of Prof. Ismael Moya, at the CNRS, France, working on discerning which molecules are responsible for the blue-green fluorescence of plants, and their use, together with the fluorescence of chlorophyll and the reflectance of plants, in remote sensing of stress situations. He was National Prize (Francisco Sabater) in Plant Physiology of the Spanish Society of Plant Physiology (SEFV, currently Spanish Society of Plant Biology, SSPB) in 1999. He is currently Researcher Professor of the CSIC and works in the field of sustainable agriculture and climate change. In particular, he is focused on investigating, using physiological, biochemical and genetic variability approaches, how different crops respond to the increase in atmospheric CO2 and in their interactions with the increase in temperature and water availability, all associated and in a context of climate change. He leads at the Agrobiotecnology Institute (IdAB-CSIC) a line of viticulture and climate change. Within this context, prototypes for measuring grape/bunch transpiration and respiration (both CO2 and O2) have been developed and are routinely used for a non-destructive monitoring of the ripening process in grapes.

Department of Biotechnology, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain;Dr Oscar Vicente is a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Professor in the Department of Biotechnology and a research group leader at the Institute of Conservation and Improvement of Valencian Agrodiversity (COMAV), Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), Spain. He earned his PhD in Sciences in 1983 from the Autonomous University of Madrid. Following a three-year postdoctoral period at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, Dr. Vicente moved in 1988 to the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, University of Vienna, Austria, where he established a research group working on plant reproductive biology and its biotechnological applications, and on the molecular characterisation of pollen allergens and plant MAP kinases. In 1996, Dr. Vicente returned to Spain to join the UPV faculty, where he currently teaches various courses in molecular biology and biotechnology to Biotechnology and Biomedical Engineering students. He has supervised 12 PhD Theses (another two are at present in progress) and the work of many undergraduate, master and exchange students, and visiting scientists His research is centred on the study of plant responses to abiotic stress and stress tolerance mechanisms within the context of climate change, using different crops, crop relatives, and wild species naturally tolerant to stress (e.g., halophytes) as experimental materials and integrating field and laboratory/greenhouse work with physiological, biochemical, and molecular approaches. Dr. Vicente has published approximately 190 indexed scientific papers, predominantly in the Plant Sciences category (Web of Science; h-index: 39). He serves as vice president and coordinator for Spain of the European Biotechnology Thematic Network Association (EBTNA) and is included in the ‘Top-100’ Spanish scientists in Plant Science and Agronomy (Research.com). In 2017, the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, awarded him the Doctor Honoris Causa degree.