 So, we're all aware that green is this concept that links plants, environmental stewardship, and energy efficiency. But have you ever stopped to think, how energy efficient are plants, really? And what would it mean if they were more energy efficient? Well, I can tell you that plants have an abundance of ways in which they waste their energy. But this is undesirable for our crop plants because we want them to store as much of that energy as possible in things like grains and fruits so that we can harvest it later. So how can we go about making our crop plants to be more energy efficient and better food producers for the future? Well plants have two energy generating systems, photosynthesis and respiration. Photosynthesis captures light energy and converts carbon from the atmosphere into sugars where this energy is stored. Respiration generates energy by burning the sugars produced by photosynthesis. Over the course of a day, most of the sugar produced by photosynthesis is burned up by respiration. What remains? That is the energy gain for the plant and it can be stored or invested into new plant growth. Now this situation repeats itself day after day and what you get is something like compounding interest where a very small difference in the energy gain, the rate of energy gain, over time like the growth period for a plant can result in large differences in the total energy stored by a plant. Well unfortunately plants have never taken accounting 101 because they often perform their respiration in a purposely energy inefficient way. It's like heating your house with the windows open and they use way more energy than they need to. So one key to improving energy gain in plants is to make respiration more efficient. The goal of my research is to be able to compare respiration efficiency between different varieties of the same plant and identify those varieties which are most efficient with their energy use. Sounds straight forward? It is. The problem is a technical one. The differences in respiration will be quite small and hard to detect. Therefore my research is relying on new technology to measure plant respiration with way more precision than ever before. Here at the UWA we have repurposed a robot to make thousands of respiration measurements to identify small differences between plants that over time can add up to big differences in plant energy storage. Ultimately what I hope to achieve is to establish respiration efficiency as a measurement technique that is of interest to crop breeders and to see this technique used in the field to make our crop plants, how can I say this, just a little bit greener.