The Overlooked Plants That Could Help Feed the Future

The next breakthrough in agriculture may be growing quietly in a ditch — and Duke alumnus and David M. Goodner Associate Professor of Biology Fay-Wei Li is back on campus to find it. 

One of three new faculty joining the department in 2026, Li studies overlooked plants such as hornworts and ferns for clues to some of agriculture’s biggest challenges: How to grow more food with less water and fertilizer in a changing climate. 

For Li, returning to Duke fulfills a long-held dream while opening a new chapter in his research. As a Ph.D. student, he found a community and intellectual home that he hoped to one day revisit as a professor. 

“I enjoyed my time at Duke so much,” he said. “Back then, my dream was to, maybe, one day come back as a professor. Now I’m here and it’s so awesome.” 

His long-term goals are ambitious: Uncover how plants capture carbon and acquire nutrients so efficiently, then explore whether those strategies can help build more productive, water-wise and climate-resilient crops. 

At Duke, his lab will continue to investigate hornworts — small plants related to mosses and liverworts that have an unusual advantage when it comes to photosynthesis. Like all plants, they use light, water and carbon dioxide to produce energy. But hornworts are particularly efficient, having evolved ways to maximize their ability to fix carbon — the process where atmospheric carbon is used to produce sugars such as glucose, which plants use as a source of energy. 

Carbon fixation depends on an enzyme called Rubisco. Rubisco is essential, but inefficient. It is slow and can mistake oxygen for carbon dioxide, triggering photorespiration, a wasteful process that reduces a plant’s productivity. Plants compensate by producing large amounts of Rubisco, using significant resources in the process. Hornworts are able to concentrate carbon dioxide around Rubisco, minimizing the risk of triggering photorespiration rather carbon fixation. 

“If we can make rice or tomatoes do the [hornwort] photosynthesis, we can improve the crop yield by 30 to 80%,” Li said. “It’s a massive improvement if we can figure this out and engineer it into crop plants.” 

The potential benefits extend beyond yield. More efficient photosynthesis could help crops use water and fertilizer more effectively. Plants might not need to keep their stomata — the tiny pores on their leaves — open as often to absorb carbon dioxide, allowing them to conserve water and thrive in more arid environments. 

“Photosynthesis is central to everything in agriculture,” Li explained. “The water use, the fertilizer use, everything depends on photosynthesis. If you can improve that, it’s a big thing.”

“The diversity of plants is so vast, and a lot of them have been overlooked. If we look in the corner, if we look in the ditches, maybe there’s some surprise we can learn.” — Fay-Wei Li

His lab is developing the tools needed to study hornworts, including growing them in the laboratory, sequencing their genomes and genetically manipulating them to test the function of individual genes. 

The lab is also investigating hornworts’ relationships with nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. In this partnership, the plants provide carbon to the bacteria, while the bacteria provide nitrogen — a natural alternative to some synthetic fertilizers. 

The work reflects Li’s position at the intersection of molecular and evolutionary biology. Rather than focusing exclusively on one standard “model” plant, his lab looks across the diversity of plant life for unusual traits that might reveal new biological possibilities. 

“The diversity of plants is so vast, and a lot of them have been overlooked,” he said. “If we look in the corner, if we look in the ditches, maybe there’s some surprise we can learn.” 

That spirit of discovery also shapes Li’s work with ferns. Fern genomes can be extraordinarily large — up to 50 times larger than the human genome — and some species have more than 1,000 chromosomes (humans have 46). Li’s lab is working with collaborators to understand what all that genetic material does and how such complex genomes evolved. 

Collaboration and mentorship are central to Li’s research. Although he is spending this first year establishing his lab, applying for funding and preparing future courses in plant biodiversity, undergraduates have already begun reaching out, including one student who first contacted him while still in high school.  

“Science is teamwork,” he said. “The students and my lab members are doing all the work. Sometimes I’m just the cheerleader, helping them figure out what went wrong and how I can help.” 

That collaborative spirit also carries into Li’s public-facing work. His 2025 book “Ferns: Lessons in Survival From Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants,” which he describes as a “garden club book with lots of science,” as well as a recent  NSF grant and a paper in Science, provide momentum for a research program grounded in a simple premise: Important discoveries may come from the plants scientists have learned to overlook.