Plant Science Impact – Magda Julkowska, Boyce Thompson Institute

At the Boyce Thompson Institute, plant scientist Magda Julkowska is uncovering how crops respond to drought and salinity, identifying the traits and genetic mechanisms that could help future crops produce more food with less water.

Fresh water is one of agriculture's most valuable and increasingly constrained resources. While most of the Earth's surface is covered in water, only a small fraction is available as fresh water, and agriculture remains its largest consumer. As growers face increasing pressure to produce more food with fewer resources, plant scientists are searching for new ways to help crops thrive under water-limited conditions.

For Dr. Magdalena Julkowska, Assistant Professor at the Boyce Thompson Institute and adjunct faculty member at Cornell University, the answer may lie in understanding how plants naturally adapt to stress, especially below ground, where roots quietly determine how efficiently plants capture water and survive harsh conditions.

Her work combines plant physiology, genetics, machine learning, and high-throughput phenotyping to uncover traits that could help future crops use water more efficiently, tolerate drought, and maintain productivity in challenging environments.

Looking Below the Surface

For much of her career, Julkowska has focused on one of the most overlooked yet critical aspects of plant performance: root architecture.

Plants continuously make decisions about where to invest their energy. Under drought conditions, many species shift resources away from shoots and into roots, increasing their ability to search for water while reducing water loss through transpiration.

Understanding these adaptations is central to Julkowska's research. "We're trying to figure out how we can optimize plant architecture so plants become more efficient with the water they have available," she explains. "That includes both limited fresh water and environments affected by salinity."

The challenge is global in scope. Water scarcity is no longer confined to traditionally arid regions. Agricultural systems throughout the world increasingly face variable rainfall patterns, declining aquifer reserves, and growing competition for freshwater resources.

Julkowska first encountered the urgency of this challenge during her postdoctoral research in Saudi Arabia, where fresh water comes largely from desalination or from ancient, non-renewable aquifers.

"The fresh water was more expensive than petroleum," she recalls. "It really changes your perspective on how valuable water is." That experience sparked a broader question that continues to drive her work today: Can we develop crops that maintain productivity while requiring less high-quality fresh water?

Nature's Untapped Genetic Library

One strategy involves studying the wild relatives of modern crops. Unlike cultivated varieties that have been bred under managed agricultural conditions for thousands of years, wild species evolved under natural environmental stresses, developing survival mechanisms that may hold valuable lessons for crop improvement.

Julkowska's research has focused heavily on Solanum pimpinellifolium, a wild relative of cultivated tomato. Surprisingly, while screening a collection of wild tomatoes from the Galápagos Islands, the team noticed one accession with exceptional tolerance to salinity. It turned out to be S. pimpinellifolium, included in the collection by accident. That finding reinforced what the team was seeing across a large S. pimpinellifolium diversity panel, where salt tolerance arose from a complex combination of shoot and root traits, including growth maintenance, transpiration, and water use efficiency. [1]

More recently, her team found that two salt-tolerant tomato lines, one wild (S. pimpinellifolium, from the same diversity panel) and one cultivated, reach similar outcomes through different root strategies under salt stress. One prioritizes forming new lateral roots; the other prioritizes elongating the lateral roots it already has. When the two were crossed, the offspring maintained root growth under salt even better than either parent.[2]

"It's essentially layering different mechanisms of tolerance together," Julkowska explains.

Today, Julkowska contributes to a large collaborative project funded by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and led by BTI’s Zhangjun Fei, which is evaluating approximately 600 genotypes across 16 wild tomato species to identify genetic and physiological traits linked to drought resilience and stress adaptation.

The goal is not simply to find a single "silver bullet" gene. Instead, researchers are building a deeper understanding of how entire systems of traits interact to influence crop performance under stress.

Beyond Genetics: Understanding Plant Behavior

Modern plant science is generating unprecedented volumes of genomic information. But Julkowska believes one of the next frontiers lies in understanding relationships among plant traits themselves:

• Why does one plant maintain productivity under drought while another does not?
• Which physiological signals appear early enough to predict future performance?
• How do traits interact to influence yield?

These questions have led her lab at BTI into the emerging world of phenomics and machine learning.

Using advanced models, her team examines thousands of measurements simultaneously to identify which traits are most strongly associated with stress tolerance.

In earlier tomato studies, transpiration rate emerged as one of the strongest predictors of salinity tolerance. Other potential indicators are proving equally fascinating. One example is anthocyanin accumulation, the naturally occurring pigments responsible for purple coloration in many plants. The changes in anthocyanin levels that Julkowska observes are too small to see by eye, but they show up clearly in multispectral imaging, often long before visible stress symptoms appear.

Those early signals may ultimately help breeders identify resilient plants faster and more accurately than traditional methods alone.

Why Phenotyping Matters

Capturing these insights requires far more than a conventional growth room. At BTI’s PhenoSight facility, which Julkowska directs and which is open to academic and industry users, a Conviron growth chamber is integrated with an automated phenotyping platform, where plants move through a fully controlled environment on conveyor systems while remaining inside the growth chamber throughout the experiment.

The integrated approach delivers several important advantages. First, plants experience highly reproducible environmental conditions. Automated weighing and watering systems weigh each pot at every watering and precisely deliver water according to predefined protocols. This level of control is especially valuable for drought studies, where even small differences in water availability can significantly influence results.

Second, researchers can collect large volumes of data non-destructively. Every plant is repeatedly imaged using an RGB camera and a multispectral chlorophyll fluorescence camera that monitor growth, biomass accumulation, photosynthetic performance, and stress responses over time.

Importantly, plants never need to leave the controlled environment.

For heat-sensitive or environmentally responsive species, even briefly moving plants outside a chamber can introduce unwanted stress and compromise experimental consistency.

"Everything happens within the chamber," says Julkowska. "If a plant is adapted to specific environmental conditions, we don't want to create an unintended stress event just by moving it through the measurement process." The impact on research productivity is dramatic. Processes that once required researchers to manually assess hundreds or thousands of plants can now be completed in hours. This enables Julkowska's team to detect transient physiological responses that might otherwise be missed entirely.

Building More Resilient Agriculture

While much of Julkowska's work is fundamental, curiosity-driven science, its implications extend far beyond the laboratory. The genes, traits, and physiological signals her team is uncovering could ultimately help inform breeding programs for major crops worldwide, from tomatoes and legumes to cereals and other food staples.

The broader objective is simple but profound: helping agriculture become more productive while using resources more efficiently. As water availability becomes an increasingly important constraint in many production regions, understanding how plants naturally cope with stress may become one of the most valuable tools available to researchers and breeders.

Through the combination of advanced controlled environments, automated phenotyping, and innovative biological research, Julkowska and her colleagues are building that understanding one experiment at a time. The result is not merely better data. It is a clearer roadmap toward crops that can produce more with less, helping agriculture adapt to the challenges of the future while safeguarding one of its most precious resources: water.

The research described here is supported by the National Science Foundation (award 2244735) and the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR).

Endnotes

1. Morton M, et al. (2024) Deciphering salt stress responses in Solanum pimpinellifolium through high-throughput phenotyping. The Plant Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/tpj.16...

2. Ishka MR, et al. (2026) Genomics approach links ROS-scavenging to enhanced lateral root development under salt stress in tomato. Plant, Cell & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.70...