ERI: A Systematic Engineering Approach to Understanding How Mechanical Stimuli Shape Plant Growth and Lodging Resistance

This Engineering Research Initiation (ERI) award supports a research and education program addressing stalk lodging, which currently reduces global agricultural yields by 5 to 20 percent annually. While animal bones adapt to physical stress through well-understood rules of remodeling, the equivalent process in plants, known as thigmomorphogenesis, remains a significant scientific blind spot. This research leverages five decades of bone adaptation literature to systematically investigate whether plants follow similar threshold and saturation curves in response to mechanical loading. The study specifically investigates four primary rules derived from bone remodeling (load speed, magnitude, dose-dependency, and acclimation) to determine their functional role in plant structural development. By utilizing both monocot (Setaria italica) and dicot (Arabidopsis thaliana) species, the researchers will explore how universal these biomechanical responses are across evolutionarily divergent plant lineages. This systematic approach is designed to transform qualitative observations into a rigorous engineering framework, ultimately providing the data necessary to improve crop resilience against intensifying climate volatility. Utilizing a custom robotic platform, the research will apply precise mechanical "exercise" to plant stems. By integrating high-throughput phenotyping with predictive multi-scale finite element models, the study will specifically isolate how mechanical stimuli structural growth and material properties. This work aims to advance the fields of biomechanics and mechanobiology by introducing a unified, engineering-driven framework for plant morphogenesis that has historically relied on qualitative observations. By establishing quantitative "rules" for plant adaptation, this research creates mechanistically predictive tools that link environmental stimuli directly to physical phenotypes, a novel approach that bridges the gap between biological signaling and structural engineering. This project aligns with NSF priorities by catalyzing transformative research at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution. Furthermore, it supports the NSF goal of enhancing national food security by providing the fundamental knowledge necessary to engineer crops capable of withstanding increasingly volatile weather patterns. Through the Technical Enrichment and Outreach Program, the project also extends its impact to high school students, fostering the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists in engineering and agriculture. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2552632 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Christopher Stubbs | Institution: Fairleigh Dickinson University, TEANECK, NJ | Award Amount: $199,844 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2552632 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2552632.html