The Quest for Heatproof Chickpeas
Chickpea vs the Heatwave
Inside the race to future-proof a tiny crop—with UQ crop physiologist Dr Millicent Smith.
The villain is invisible. It strikes inside a flower, during a narrow window in a chickpea’s life, and by the time a farmer sees the damage the future harvest may already be gone.
On a hot Friday afternoon at The University of Queensland, Science Dungeon field reporters Evie and Nicole met Dr Millicent Smith, a crop physiologist who studies how grain legumes cope with a changing environment. Their conversation travelled from root nodules to seed vaults, from field disasters to artificial intelligence—and from five precious seeds in a yellow packet to crop trials spanning Australia.
This is that interview reimagined as a science adventure: one small crop, one enormous climate challenge, and a research team determined to find the plants that can take the heat.
Meet the unlikely superhero
You called chickpeas a superhero. What is so special about them?
They are legumes. Chickpea roots and nitrogen-fixing bacteria called rhizobia form a relationship in root nodules, giving the plant access to nitrogen from the atmosphere. “It’s a pretty clever evolutionary skill.”
Chickpeas are not fixing nitrogen alone. The superpower belongs to a partnership: bacteria live in specialised root nodules, where they convert atmospheric nitrogen into forms the plant can use. That can reduce the crop’s reliance on nitrogen fertiliser. After harvest, nitrogen in decomposing legume residues can also contribute to the soil nitrogen available to following crops.
There is a second superpower. Chickpea grain is rich in protein and helps feed millions of people. Yet grain legumes such as chickpeas, beans and lentils have historically received less research attention than cereals like wheat, rice and maize.
“They can feed so many people and provide a lot to our diets. We probably don’t eat enough of them. I don’t.”Dr Millicent Smith
For Dr Smith, that makes chickpeas doubly important: they can support both human nutrition and farming systems. The challenge is making sure they can keep doing it as environments become hotter and more variable.
The heatwave attacks
A hot day is not equally dangerous at every stage of a chickpea’s life. When the plant is young and leafy, it has some capacity to recover by growing more biomass. But flowering and pod-setting create an invisible danger window.
Leafy stage
Heat can slow or damage growth, but the plant may still recover and make more leaves.
Flowering + pods
Pollen is vulnerable. A flower may look normal even when heat has stopped it from forming a seed-filled pod.
Gradual warmth tends to accelerate the plant’s development, rushing it through its life cycle and leaving less time to fill seeds. A sudden, badly timed heatwave can be more dramatic: if it lands during flowering, yield losses may be catastrophic.
Do you ever feel guilty deliberately putting the plants in hot environments?
“I enjoy it… not because I’m cruel!” Stressing the plants gives the team valuable information about how they respond.
What makes a result real?
Replication and repetition. Researchers grow multiple plants in different positions, then repeat trials across locations and years. One plant, one paddock or one season is never enough to declare victory.
Twenty thousand tiny passports
The Australian Grains Genebank holds more than 20,000 kinds of chickpea. Growing every one in every possible experiment would be impossible, so the hunt begins with clues.
“Every chickpea comes to Australia with a little passport.”Dr Millicent Smith
The “passport” records where a seed came from. Latitude, longitude and climate history help the team find lines that may already be adapted to hotter environments. Genetic information then helps select a diverse set rather than hundreds of near-duplicates.
The first 800 candidates arrived in tiny yellow packets—sometimes just five or ten seeds of each. Those seeds had to be multiplied. Researchers also checked practical traits: did the plant stand upright enough for a mechanical harvester? When did it flower? From there, 400 lines advanced into field trials.
“We’ve gone from little yellow packets to big trials across Australia,” Dr Smith said. “We go from five seeds to having trials all the way across Australia.”
Enter the digital matchmaker
Plant breeders can cross two chickpea lines to combine useful traits. But which two? Dr Smith describes the team’s prediction tools as “well-informed digital matchmakers.”
Measure at least 200 plants carefully, connect their DNA with traits such as flowering time or yield, and a model can learn the relationship. It can then predict offspring from crosses that have never been made—and rank thousands of possible pairings before anyone reaches for a paintbrush to transfer pollen.
“It can simulate more combinations than stars in the sky.”Dr Millicent Smith
That scale is superhuman. Scientific judgement is still essential. A row of trees beside a field can shade plants and skew measurements. A biologist who knows the crop and the site can recognise that context. And while an algorithm can search possibilities, Dr Smith says it is not always good at deciding which questions are worth asking.
Who wins when the data disagrees with the scientist? “It’s always the data—because I’m a scientist, not an opinion-piece writer.”
Science is a team sport
The lone genius in a silent laboratory makes a tidy comic-book origin story. It is also, Dr Smith says, one of the biggest misconceptions about science.
Different expertise
Crop physiologists work with breeders, agronomists, geneticists, crop modellers and data scientists.
Different places
Field teams and collaborators run trials across regions and years, sharing data and local knowledge.
Shared problem
People with unlike backgrounds see different parts of the same challenge—and make the answer stronger.
“That’s how we can solve such big challenges: by working with people who are not the same as us.”Dr Millicent Smith
Leading a research team also means solving deeply unglamorous problems. An instrument fails. Seed is still in Victoria when it needs to be in Western Australia. A flood arrives during a drought experiment. The majority of Dr Smith’s day, she says, is now making decisions, navigating logistics and helping her team move forward.
The rapid-fire file
“I have a dead plant in one of my offices.”
Yes—but “I’m good at stressing plants out. That’s my job.”
Coffee in the car on the way to the field. Tea for the rest of the day.
Washing soil from 1.8-metre chickpea roots for weeks.
Knocking on wood. Even scientists can be superstitious.
“I’ve never thought about it. You guys should totally do this.”
Choose curiosity
Dr Smith knew unusually early that she wanted to use agriculture to make a difference. But her advice to school students is not to have an immaculate career plan. It is to stay curious—and to be brave when curiosity opens an unexpected door.
“Being curious and being open to new things is way more important than knowing what you want to do.”Dr Millicent Smith
The chickpea quest is still unfolding. Somewhere in a field, a heatwave is testing flowers. Somewhere in a seed vault, a yellow packet holds an overlooked survivor. And somewhere between the plant, the data and the people asking better questions, the next resilient crop is waiting to be found.
This story was adapted from a 71-minute interview recorded on 4 September 2026. Quotations were lightly edited for length and clarity and checked against the supplied audio. Scientific context was cross-checked against Dr Smith’s current University of Queensland profile. Illustrations are AI-generated editorial interpretations based on the supplied interview photograph; the closing portrait is a stylised rendering rather than a documentary image.