Post by Lukas Vonmetz

🫛 "Selfish behaviour" in plants may come at a cost for crop yield ! One of the key takeaways for me is how strongly evolutionary “logic” can still shape modern cropping systems. Traits like shade avoidance make perfect sense from an individual plant perspective but in dense stands they can actually limit yield gains and even increase vulnerability to herbivores. While productivity has increased, competitive responses have not disappeared looking across nearly 100 years of soybean breeding and may still act as a hidden constraint under certain conditions. This raises an exciting challenge for future breeding: how do we move from selecting “selfish” plants to designing crops that perform best as a community? Very pleased to see this work published and especially proud that this is my first paper!🎉 Many thanks to Emanuel Kopp, Simon Jäggi, Pascal Niklaus and Samuel Wuest for the excellent teamwork throughout this project! 🙌🌱