Scientists from around the world, including Australia, are looking to the benefits of synthetic biology to ensure the world has enough food as the effects of climate change begin to be felt.
Synthetic biology is the process of bio-engineering organisms, usually plants, to make them more useful by giving them new properties or abilities.
A group of scientists, including from the CSIRO and the University of Queensland, said the emerging field could be a way for the world to rapidly respond to the problems caused by a warming world.
CSIRO synthetic biology future science platform director Claudia Vickers said agriculture in particular would benefit from the research as climate change began to have an effect.
"Climate change is happening, and it’s happening far more quickly than we have previously been able to develop new [crop] breeds," Dr Vickers said.
"So we need to have technologies which can deliver traits much more quickly than they have in the past, and we need to be able to do that very fast - by 2050 we need a dramatically improved agriculture system."
Dr Vickers, who is also the group leader at UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, said the technique should be used to develop resistance against disease, pests and drought in food crops.
The CSIRO has already applied synthetic biology to produce energy-rich feed for livestock, by "switching on" oil production in the whole structure of plants such as canola, soybean, sunflower, coconut and oil palm, whereas previously the oil was only in the plants’ seeds.
Synthetic biology is "on the same spectrum" as genetically modified food, which Dr Vickers admitted still had a large group of people sceptical of the health and environmental benefits.
Dr Vickers said it was therefore important to ensure people were aware of the process and its benefits, as well as the science behind it, to ensure no one thought scientists were "tinkering" with the natural order.
"Synthetic biology can seem alien both to scientists and the public due to many of the conceptual spaces and engineering principles it embraces," she said.
"Seizing its potential therefore requires major shifts in training and infrastructure; and in how research priorities are explained and their benefits demonstrated."
Dr Vickers said Australia had world-leading regulatory policy regarding genetically modified crops, and any plants developed through synthetic biology would automatically fall under that regulatory framework.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns a rise of just 1.5 degrees in the global average temperature would cause 8 per cent of plants to lose half their habitable area.
A 1.5-degree rise is considered the level of rise the planet will see in the next few decades, even with intervention to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"Human civilisation depends on efficient agriculture, so that’s why we’ve focused on that for this article," Dr Vickers said.
"We know there’s a huge challenge for us and the planet going forward."
The perspective paper have been published in the journal Nature Plants on Tuesday and, in addition to the CSIRO, includes input from scientists from the US, Germany and Denmark.