Summary
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 s
