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In the first issue of New Phytologist, in 1902, the founding editor, Sir Arthur Tansley told his readers that ‘Topics are constantly arising on which … discussion would be valuable not only to the one or two people immediately interested, but to the rest of their colleagues’. Accordingly, his vision from the outset was that the content of the journal would continue to evolve as the interest of its authors and readers evolved. To this day, we strive to ensure that the work we publish has broad appeal to our community and regularly review our content, asking ourselves whether any subject areas are missing from our pages. It is as a result of recently conducting this exercise that we are delighted to announce the formation of a new section of the journal to be headed by Professor Claire Halpin (University of Dundee, UK) called Transformative Plant Biotechnology. Our intention in establishing this new section is to reflect the growing interest in plant biotechnology. We recognize that plant biotechnology is a very wide discipline, so rather than attempting to capture its breadth we have decided to specialize. After much deliberation, we are pleased to announce that we wish to publish innovative studies that describe how results from the fields of plant bioengineering, plant synthetic biology, plant biodesign and other examples of exciting emerging technologies could provide solutions to major societal needs or could help to mitigate the effects of environment and climate change. The emphasis on research that contributes to societal needs and helps to mitigate the effects of climate change is deliberate. This is because we feel that it is particularly important that the efforts of plant scientists the world over in this area are recognized and celebrated. It is 40 yr since the first production of genetically modified plants and nearly 30 yr since the first commercial releases. These biotech crops have contributed to agricultural economics, global food security, sustainability and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by increasing crop productivity, conserving biodiversity, reducing pesticide use and alleviating poverty and hunger for many farmer's families. Yet, four crucial and disruptive advances accelerate the opportunities for plant biotechnology to have greater and more rapid ‘transformational’ value in the coming decades. Advances in our fundamental understanding of plant genes, mechanisms, biosynthetic pathways, regulatory circuits and signalling cascades allow us unprecedented insights with which to manipulate plant growth, environmental/ecological interactions and plant product biosynthesis. Advances in several technologies enable us to manipulate these processes for outcomes more ambitious, more versatile, more precise and more predictable than was previously possible. Advances in the regulatory landscape for precision breeding technologies in some countries will soon stimulate and expedite crucial early field testing, underpinning further translation towards societal benefit of promising projects. And, unfortunately, advances in the threats facing our expanding global population increase the urgency of deploying plant biotechnology towards transformational impacts on food security, climate change, biodiversity, long-term sustainability and improvements in human health. Of course, as with all submissions to the journal, manuscripts should offer novel insights into the field or should present advances that will be of significant interest to the community. In order to provide some guidance concerning the type of content that is likely to interest us, we have put together the following, nonexhaustive, list of the sort of topics that we would welcome. Over the past few years, we have commissioned several well-received Tansley reviews and insights on topics directly relevant to Transformative Plant Biotechnology, for example, on plant synthetic biology (Patron, 2020), optogenetics (Christie & Zurbriggen, 2021), forisomes (Noll et al., 2022) and genetic modification to improve disease resistance (Van Esse et al., 2020) or plant productivity (Raines, 2022). The growing interest in this area among our readers is illustrated by the number of relevant full research papers published within the past few months alone. While the focus of these works was usually on improving our understanding of fundamental plant processes rather than directly on exploiting the biotechnological applications that they exemplify, collectively they reveal the breadth of work that the new Transformative Plant Biotechnology section hopes to attract. Several describe very novel routes to engineering pathogen resistance, for example, to barley stripe mosaic virus (Wu et al., 2022), Fusarium wilt in cucumber (Bartholomew et al.,2022) or broad-spectrum resistance to multiple pathogens in rice (Feng et al., 2022). Others describe interventions that can improve seed size in soya bean, or seed vigour and longevity in rice (Hazra et al., 2022; Zhu et al., 2022). Biotechnological approaches to conferring tolerance to abiotic stresses likely to increase over the next decades are illustrated by work on salinity tolerance in rice (Lu et al., 2022) or drought tolerance in wheat (Du et al., 2022). And De Meester et al. (2022) remind us of the crucial role of field trials in evaluating all biotech crops by revealing that lignin-modified poplars that grew normally in the glasshouse and with processing benefits useful to a future bioeconomy show adverse phenotypes when grown in the field. In the current issue, we publish very topical correspondence on crop gene editing regulations in different countries from Buchholzer & Frommer (2022, in this issue), together with a commentary on the same topic from our Forum Editor, David Salt (2022, in this issue). We hope that you will share our excitement in developing this new section in the journal. In 2023, we will organize a scientific meeting devoted to research in the area of Transformative Plant Biotechnology. Please do look out for announcements. We hope to see you there.