A combination of the escalating human population and a growing need for crops, not only as a food source but also as a means to meet a number of industrial applications including biofuels, means that worldwide crop production is under increasing stress; the challenge for the modern plant scientist are to meet this demand for crops in an sustainable way without increasing the land available for farming; the aim of plant science researchers at Manchester is to tackle these problems by using a multi-faceted approach to understand the endogenous and extrinsic factors which regulate plant growth, development, evolution and adaptation.