Rice blast fungus: sustainable plant disease control - Nick Talbot 🍚🦠

Filmed during the United Nations International Year of Plant Health, Professor Nick Talbot details the plant diseases ravaging crops around the world and what we can do about them. Recent advances in the understanding of plant immunity allow us to develop new control strategies for plant diseases. These strategies could make a significant difference to the lives of many expecially the world’s poorest people who suffer enormous hardship when crops fail due to disease outbreaks. Nick discusses the devastating rice blast disease as an example.

00:00 Introduction
01:33 Why does plant health matter?
05:15 The background of food insecurity
08:25 Agriculture and cimate change
10:39 Redesigning our crops
12:07 The treat of plant diseases
15:36 Combatting rice blast disease
17:37 The life cycle of rice blast fungus
30:12 How can we control rice blast fungus?
37:42 Summary and conclusion

Speaker profile: Professor Nicholas Talbot is Group Leader and Executive Director at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich. He studied Microbiology at the University of Wales, Swansea in 1986 going on to the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he was awarded a PhD in 1990 for genetic and genomic analysis of the leaf mould, Cladosporuim fulvum. After postdoctoral research at Purdue University, Nick was appointed a Lecturer at the University of Exeter in 1993, and has been Professor of Molecular Genetics since 1999. He was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer in 2010. In 2018, Nick joined The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich as Group Leader and Executive Director. Nick's research investigates plant pathology and developmental biology, especially the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe grisea, one of the world's most devastating diseases.

Filmed as part of the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2020.