©Forschungszentrum Jülich

On 23 September 2026, we were pleased to welcome Lene Lange for the 37th BioSC Lecture at Forschungszentrum Jülich. She provided an insightful overview of how the resilience of crops and entire agricultural ecosystems can be improved in the face of rapid environmental changes. Her work spanned a wide range of topics, in particular plant breeding, plant protection, soil improvement, and functional analyses of entire microbiomes, such as those found in soil.

Regarding plant breeding, she welcomed the EU's recent decision that plants bred with new genomic technologies will, under specified conditions, no longer be treated as genetically modified organisms, citing potato late blight as an example how this enables the faster breeding of resistant varieties and a significant reduction in pesticide use. As a new alternative to genomic technologies, she presented FIND-IT, a method recently developed and tested in the Carlsberg Research Laboratory which combines induced mutagenesis with large-scale sample-pooling and droplet digital PCR. This greatly speeds up the identification of desired mutations and development of new crop lines.

The second major topic of the lecture was soil health and improvement. Lene Lange reported on two start-ups in the United States and in Greece that have developed fungal-based products for soil improvement and plant protection which have been proven to increase crop yield. However, the Greek start-up is facing serious problems with commercialization because of EU regulation which she strongly criticized. She then presented CUPP (Conserved Unique Peptide Patterns), a bioinformatics tool she co-developed, that can predict the composition and function of the secretome of entire microbiomes and can help design microbial consortia to restore microbiome health in soils.

The lecture was rounded out by the issues of valorizing crop residues through cascading use and improvement of forage crops. Thank you for an exciting afternoon with detailed insights into a wide range of topics!