In the future, 8-10 billion people will need to be fed by our agriculture and food production system. Moreover, currently up to five billion people are already affected by malnutrition including undernutrition, inadequate consumption of micronutrients, and overweight. A healthy and sustainable diet will therefore play a pivotal role in our future, but most food products are traded and consumed based only on techno-functional or gustatory properties. We wish to stimulate a debate on the urgent need for multidisciplinary research and education to realize future diets with enhanced nutritional profiles. In particular, there is a need to better measure and understand the factors that influence the nutrients of food products along the global supply chains.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapidly and continually evolving in various fields. Recently, the release of ChatGPT has sparked significant public interest. In this study, we revisit the '100 Important Questions Facing Plant Science' by leveraging ChatGPT as a valuable tool for generating thought-provoking questions relevant to plant science. These questions primarily revolve around the utilization of plants in product development, understanding plant mechanisms, plant-environment interactions, and enhancing plant traits, with an emphasis on sustainable product development. While ChatGPT may not capture certain crucial aspects highlighted by scientists, it offers valuable insights into the questions generated by experts. Our analysis demonstrates that ChatGPT can be cautiously employed as a supportive tool to facilitate, streamline, and expedite specific tasks in plant science.

The importance of biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) in securing food production for the growing world population with minimal environmental cost has been increasingly acknowledged. Leaf surfaces are one of the biggest microbial habitats on Earth, harboring diverse free-living N2-fixers. These microbes inhabit the epiphytic and endophytic phyllosphere and contribute significantly to plant N supply and growth. Here, we summarize the contribution of phyllosphere-BNF to global N cycling, evaluate the diversity of leaf-associated N2-fixers across plant hosts and ecosystems, illustrate the ecological adaptation of N2-fixers to the phyllosphere, and identify the environmental factors driving BNF. Finally, we discuss potential BNF engineering strategies to improve the nitrogen uptake in plant leaves and thus sustainable food production.