Engineering resilient food systems in a warming world

Beyond rising seas, displaced communities and disrupted livelihoods, climate change is increasingly threatening the foundations of food security. For every rise of 1 °C in the global mean surface temperature, there is an annual decrease in global food production equivalent to around 4.4% of the recommended daily consumption per person, according to a 2025 Nature analysis¹.

Nature Spotlight: Synthetic biology

Increased soil salinity and other environmental stressors, such as drought and extreme temperatures, are key drivers of this trend, accounting for nearly half of the global crop-yield losses each year. In low-lying areas such as coastal Bangladesh, climate change has been implicated in an uptick in cyclones, rising sea levels and extreme seasonal weather. As a result, millions of hectares of arable land in the country have been damaged, contributing to a decline from a peak of 9.6 million hectares in 1989 to 7.9 million in 2023.

Since the 1970s, the pace of climate change has nearly doubled. Reports suggest that Earth is now warming by around 0.35 ºC per decade. As the global population heads towards nine billion people — of whom some 8.2% are already undernourished, according to the World Health Organization — scientists are looking for ways to future-proof food supplies.

Synthetic biology has emerged as a field offering budding solutions: researchers are using gene-editing tools to design crops that can withstand hostile conditions and to recycle food waste through fungal fermentation. But questions remain around the field’s true potential — can it tackle food insecurity equitably and overcome the legacy of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?

Engineering resilience

Modern agriculture has long relied on crossing plant varieties to produce crops with desirable traits, such as better taste and higher yields. Every staple crop — including maize (corn), rice, soya and wheat — was shaped over thousands of years by farmers’ selective breeding of these plants’ wild ancestors, a process referred to as domestication.

But these techniques favoured yield over stress tolerance. Climate conditions are changing too fast for standard breeding methods to keep pace, and water stress, soil degradation and salinity levels are placing strain on the world’s agricultural industries. “We don’t have thousands of years,” says Vayu Hill-Maini, a bioengineer at Stanford University in California. What we do have, he adds, is synthetic biology, which could help to speed up the domestication process.

In a 2024 paper, plant biologists Michael Palmgren, at the University of Copenhagen, and Sergey Shabala, at the University of Western Australia in Perth, suggest two pathways to more-resilient crops: editing genes to reintroduce stress-tolerance traits lost during breeding, and using precision editing in wild plants that can already endure new climates to introduce the characteristics of modern crops². Palmgren and Shabala say that environmental-stress tolerance almost always requires multiple genetic components, meaning that the search for a “silver-bullet solution”, or single key genes that can confer resilience, can be counterproductive.

But the science is advancing quickly. In 2025, researchers identified the gene encoding HMGB1 — a protein that organizes and regulates a plant’s genetic material — which, when removed, allowed rice to grow longer, thicker roots, conferring drought resistance³. There are also studies looking at many genes and how they interact. Scientists at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and their colleagues announced the completion of the world’s first fully synthetic yeast genome last year⁴, constructed over more than a decade as part of the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project (Sc2.0) consortium. The team used gene editing to correct defects in the synthetic chromosome, restoring the yeast’s ability to grow at higher temperatures.

Significant public investment is beginning to follow. In 2024, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) — a UK government agency that funds scientific research — committed £62.4 million (US$84.4 million) to nine projects looking at using gene editing to improve yields, photosynthesis and stress tolerance in crops, as well as the social and ethical implications of such research. One of the technical projects — a collaboration between Macquarie; the University of Cambridge, UK; the University of Western Australia in Crawley; and Phytoform, a biotechnology company in Harpenden, UK — hopes to transfer a synthetic plant genome into a potato. If that is successful, multiple traits could be added to staple crop breeds at once to confer resilience, avoiding years of successive breeding cycles.

But the introduction of engineered organisms into agriculture raises ecological concerns. There is a chance that new species and their wild relatives could interbreed, as detailed in one 2024 review⁵. Herbicide resistance and insect tolerance are two traits that have already been genetically added to some crops, creating the potential for herbicide-resistant superweeds that could threaten agricultural productivity and the natural ecological balance. Another 2024 review, published in Science, describes how these modifications have mixed direct and indirect effects⁶, such as increased local deforestation, impacts on natural food webs and health impacts, both negative, due to increased herbicide use, and positive, attributable to reduced insecticide use. Frederik Noack, an economist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and co-author of the Science review, argues that one of the most under-considered risks is the loss of agricultural diversity. “If we rely very heavily on a few [pesticides], if something becomes resistant against those, it spreads very quickly,” he warns.

But fears of genetically modified crops spreading into wild ecosystems and causing ecological collapse have so far proved mostly unfounded, adds Noack. Instead, he argues, more consideration should be given to how the interests of private companies steer the direction of research. “The traditional genetically modified crops had huge regulatory costs. It was very expensive to bring these to market — US$100 million or more — so many small firms and public research [organizations] never had the funding,” he says. Private companies, he adds, “develop what’s good for them, that makes a profit”.

Many first-generation genetically modified crops were engineered for resistance to broad-spectrum herbicides, which were generally sold by the private company developing the crop, says Noack. This meant that farmers needed only one herbicide, which reduced costs and possibly employment in the sector. But incentivizing reliance on a few crops, by making them cheaper and easier to produce, can also increase the crops’ vulnerability to disease and lead to nutrient deficiencies in people’s diets due to food availability, he adds. “If you have a variety [of genetically modified crop] that’s so much better [for the farmer] than everything else, you don’t need crop rotation anymore, you don’t need crop diversity anymore,” he says. “And that might have consequences for diets.”

“We need some kind of rule keeper to make sure that corporations are not just doing things for their bottom line regardless of the ecological cost, the health costs or farmers’ agency,” says Jennifer Clapp, a political economist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Stronger policies encouraging corporate competition, environmental regulation and rules on public and private investment would help to limit corporate influence, she suggests.

Creating with precision

Beyond developing resilient crops, some scientists are looking to synthetic biology to lessen the climate impacts of food production itself, by helping to create alternative food sources. Precision fermentation — a technique in which engineered microorganisms are used to produce proteins, fats and flavours — is a sustainable food-production method that is rising in prominence. The process happens in a fermentation tank in which microorganisms, such as fungi, feed off a substrate to create a secondary product.

Around the world, more than US$1 trillion of food is thrown away each year, according to a 2024 United Nations report, generating an estimated 8–10% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Hill-Maini and his team are exploring ways to recycle this food waste through fungal fermentation. Their facility contains a biotechnology laboratory and a full-scale kitchen, in which the research team collaborates with chefs.

Although many countries already use fungal fermentation, Hill-Maini says, synthetic biology can maximize the protein content, nutrition or flavour of fermented foods, such as cheese, and can change the starting substrate the food is made from, say from milk to organic waste. He adds that this method is accessible globally. “That’s the unique power of fungi and food waste: every geographical location has by-products and waste. A lot of geographic locations are familiar with fungi [in food] in some way. This is just a new way of doing it.”

Other parts of the industry are using synthetic biology to bolster a shift away from petroleum-based and chemical-heavy synthesis of food additives. Currently, crude oil is broken down into petrochemicals that are synthesized into preservatives and flavourings. Many aromatic compounds are extracted from plants using costly, solvent-heavy processes. At the Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation, part of the government’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, synthetic biologist and metabolic engineer Congqiang Zhang and his team engineer microorganisms to produce flavours, fragrances and antioxidants used in the food industry, aiming to reduce dependence on petroleum and other chemicals used in these processes.

In 2023, the team engineered bacteria that could make nerolidol synthase from strawberries⁷. This enzyme is used in the production of nerolidol — a flavouring agent and fragrance that is found in plants such as ginger and lemongrass and that often requires petroleum-derived chemical solvents to make artificially. Zhang’s team showed yields of nerolidol to be high enough for commercially viable bacterial biosynthesis — offering an alternative to conventional chemical synthesis. “Consumers already prefer bio-based flavour compounds over synthetic [petroleum-based] ones — companies tell us this,” says Zhang. “Everything starting from petroleum is a risk: not only for the environment, also [because of] political issues.”

Yet there remain three major challenges in these techniques: price, quality and public reception, says Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London. Synthetic biology can help to address the first two issues directly, through the use of precision engineering to increase yields and lower costs, and by enhancing the nutritional and sensory properties of alternative proteins, he says.

But the third, public opinion, is more complex. Food is more than simply technology or synthetic biology, says Hill-Maini. “It’s a very sensory experience, and scaling and having impact will require us to tune into that.” His path to bioengineering began with cooking — training at the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastián, Spain, and fine-dining restaurants — so the cultural dimension of food is never far from his thinking. “Food is culture, emotion, psychology, history,” he says. “We have to be very careful and aware of making sure that we’re not taking things away from people, but creating things that people want to eat because they’re delicious.” Public perception will depend on collaboration and communication, he adds.

Regulation and trust

Regulation of synthetic-biology use in food production varies globally, but there have been moves to fine-tune approaches over the past five years. Between 2022 and 2024, the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Japan and Australia all published or updated national synthetic-biology and biotechnology strategies, which outline challenges facing the sectors and actions to tackle them.

Modern synthetic biology is also contending with a legacy of public mistrust. The commercialization of early genetically modified crops — engineered for herbicide and insect resistance — in the 1990s was marred by a roll-out that failed to sufficiently inform the public or consider ecological outcomes. Public resistance was spurred by health concerns over potential new allergens in GMOs and horizontal gene transfer (HGT), the transference of foreign DNA into gut flora. Although the risk of HGT from GMOs is considered low, and safety tests were developed to assess allergenicity, perceived health risks remain a primary deterrent to public acceptance.

Jennifer Kuzma, co-founder of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says her research on public perception of genetic engineering finds that governance is a key determinant of acceptance. “Around 60% of the population is very willing to give [synthetic biology] applications a chance, if they’re well-regulated and shown to be safe,” she says.