Silicon in plants: crop protection & climate change - Sue Hartley 🐛🍃

Globally, around a 1/4 of all crops are lost to pests and diseases, even with the use of modern methods of crop protection. The production of food is also threatened by unpredictable and extreme weather events resulting from climate change.

Here, Prof Sue Hartley explores the different approaches which may provide new sustainable methods to improve crop resistance to pests and diseases, and to increase the resilience of food production to climate change. It will focus on the benefits of plant silicon, which can build up to high levels in cereals and provides protection against herbivores and pathogens, as well as mitigating the impacts of climatic stresses such as drought.

Going deeper, Sue presents recent findings on how silicon levels in plants are affected by climate, levels of herbivory, plant traits such as stomatal density, and plant gene expression. Advances in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the uptake and deposition of silicon-based defences could drive new ways of maintaining crop yields, contributing to both improved food security and climate change mitigation.

00:00 Introduction
01:11 Climate change & food security
03:21 York Environmental Sustainability Institute
04:28 Pest control and crop losses
06:56 Silica defences in plants
15:07 Increasing silicon in plants
30:43 How is silica deposited in plants?
35:37 Can silica protect our crops from climate change?
40:09 Bio-energy and bio-crops
45:50 Conclusions / summary

Speaker profile: Sue Hartley is Professor of Ecology at the University of York. She is a community ecologist recognised internationally for her work on the interactions between organisms, particularly plants and their herbivores. She has studied plant-herbivore interactions from the sub-arctic to the tropical rainforest, published over 130 papers and trained over 30 PhD students. Sue studied Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and has a PhD in Ecology from the University of York. She joined the University of Sussex in 2001, where she began her research on the use of silicon to increase crop resilience to drought, disease and insect pests. In 2010 she moved back to York to become Director of the York Environmental Sustainability Institute, an innovative research partnership bringing together leading researchers from a range of disciplines to tackle key global challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and threats to food security. Sue is a member of the BBSRC’s Strategic Advisory Panel on Agriculture and Food Security and Chair of their Sustainable Agriculture Research Innovation Club. In 2009, she delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, only the 4th woman to do since 1825. She served as President of the British Ecological Society (2016-2017) and she is a Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and a member of the Natural England Board.

www.york.ac.uk/biology/research/plant-biology/sue-hartley

Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2018.