University of Illinois Professors Praveen Kumar and Stephen Long have
developed a computer modelling system to help plant scientists breed soybean
crops that produce more and use less water. The model predicts a design for
a soybean crop with 8.5 percent more productivity, but using 13 percent less
water, and reflecting 34 percent more radiation back into space, by breeding
for slightly different leaf distribution, angles and reflectivity.

The researchers aimed for three specific areas for improvements:
productivity, water usage, and combating climate change by reflecting more
sunlight off the leaves. They used a technique called numerical optimization
to try out a very large number of combinations of structural traits to see
which combination produced the best results with respect to each of the
three goals. Their next plan is to use their computer model to analyze other
crops for their structural traits.

[news.illinois.edu]