Entries by Mary Williams

Jay Keasling. Engineering Microbes to Solve Global Challenges

Filmed for iBiology 2016 Talk Overview Dr. Jay Keasling discusses the promise of biological systems to create carbon-neutral products for a range of applications, including fuels, chemicals and drugs. Keasling discusses the application of these principles to the development of a microbial platform for the synthesis of the anti-malarial drug, artemisinic acid. This platform has […]

Alistair Fritter. People, plants and planet

Filmed at Gatsby Summer School, 2011 Abstract: Population issues are receiving renewed attention from both scientists and policy-makers and well-founded predictions of likely global population growth have given new urgency to concerns about food security and loss of ecosystem services.  Plant science has a central role to play in making it possible to feed the […]

Robert Zeigler. Importance of rice science and world food security

Filmed at the 2011 Gatsby Plant Summer School Abstract: Rice is the most important food crop of the developing world and the staple food of more than half of the world’s population, many of whom are also extremely vulnerable to high rice prices. In developing countries alone, more than 3.3 billion people depend on rice […]

Steve Long: Food, Feed and Fuel from Crops under Global Atmospheric Change. Could we have it all in 2030?

Filmed at the Gatsby Summer School, Leeds University, 2014 Abstract Demand for our major crops is expected to rise 30% by 2030, while we look increasingly to croplands for energy as well as food and feed. This is at a time when the rate of increase in yield seen over the past 60 years is […]

Giles Oldroyd. Engineering the nitrogen symbiosis for smallholder farmers in Africa

Filmed at the Gatsby Summer School, University of Cambridge 2015 Western agricultural systems are reliant on the application of inorganic nitrogen fertilisers to greatly enhance yield. However, production and application of nitrogen fertilisers account for a significant proportion of fossil fuel usage in food production and the major source of pollution from agriculture. Prof Giles […]

Beverley Glover. Flowering plant diversity: development, function and evolution

Filmed at the Gatby Summer School, University of York, 2013 http://www.tree.leeds.ac.uk/tree.2.0/view_lecture.php?permalink=MTA2Nw Abstract: The enormous species diversity of the flowering plants has puzzled evolutionary biologists since Darwin’s day. The rapid radiation of the flowering plants can be attributed at least in part to their recruitment of insects as vectors for their pollen, and the subsequent reproductive […]

Jane Langdale. Radical Ag: C4 Rice and Beyond

Filmed at the Long Now Foundation, March 2016. Revolutionary rice Feeding the world (and saving nature) in this populous century, Jane Langdale began, depends entirely on agricultural efficiency—the ability to turn a given amount of land and sunlight into ever more food. And that depends on three forms of efficiency in each crop plant: 1) […]