The Spanish Society of Plant Physiology (Sociedad Española de Fisiología Vegetal; SEFV) is a society for scientific professionals with an interest in how plant organs, tissues, cells, organelles, genes, and molecules function, not only individually but also through their interaction with the natural environment.
The society was founded in 1974, and currently has approximately 600 members distributed across the seven groups that constitute the SEFV, namely; Phytohormones, Maturation and Postharvest, Carbohydrates, Nitrogen Metabolism, Water Relations, Mineral Nutrition, and Biotechnology and Forestry Genomics.
One of the main objectives of the society is to organize meetings, which are held every two years in collaboration with fellow GPC Member Organization, the Portuguese Society of Plant Physiology (Sociedade Portuguesa de Fisiologia Vegetal; SPFV). In the alternate years between SEFV conferences, the different SEFV groups hold individual biannual meetings.
XXI Reunión de la Sociedad Española de Fisiología Vegetal/ XIV Congreso Hispano-Luso de Fisiología Vegetal. Photograph from the combined biannual meeting of the SEFV and SPFV held in Toledo, Spain in 2015
Each week the SEFV distributes a newsletter to its members containing information on courses, conference announcements around the world, jobs, student scholarship opportunities, and some current news. Twice a year the SEFV issues a bulletin that comprises a scientific review, interviews with leading figures in plant physiology, information on different research groups, abstracts of doctoral theses presented in the last 6 months, as well as news on science policy.
The SEFV is a member of the Scientific Societies Confederation of Spain (Confederacíon de Sociedades Científica de España; COSCE), which aims to contribute to scientific and technological development, act as a qualified and unified interlocutor to represent government in matters affecting science, promote the role of science in society, and contribute to the dissemination of science as a necessary and indispensable cultural ingredient.
The SEFV is also part of another GPC Member Organization, the Federation of European Societies of Plant Biology (FESPB) and has links with the Argentine Society of Plant Physiology (SAFV). (You can read a Postcard from the SAFV here.)
We sponsor student attendance at the SEFV and FESPB conferences and encourage their active participation by awarding poster and oral presentation prizes. Additionally, the SEFV convenes biannually (coinciding with the SEFV Congress) to award the Sabater Prize for young researchers.
The SEFV website, Facebook page and Twitter (@NewsSEFV) account provide information to SEFV members and general readers with an interest in plant physiology.
Plant scientists are generally very good at growing their plants, taking good care of them and making sure they’re well fed and watered. But what about their own development? Who’s growing them?
In a recent survey, Principal Investigators (PIs) were asked to rate areas of their work they perceived to be the most important. Research-related activities were valued the highest (Vitae, 2011), while conversely, “providing career development advice” and “continuing professional development” were rated as two of their lowest priorities, at around 5% (see figure). This, perhaps, is not surprising when you consider PIs need to prioritize a multitude of responsibilities on their ‘to do’ list.
Figure reproduced from Principal investigators and research leaders survey, Vitae (2011) showing the importance of activities and functions for the development of research leaders, against their own confidence in those activities
From small shoots
Like the plant, overlooking the growth of the person could lead to plant scientists being held back from a flourishing career. So, taking responsibility for your own development is vital, especially since programs of professional and personal development are not always readily available to PhD students and researchers in many institutes and universities. Even if they are, the content and timing is not always relevant or convenient. I’ve been delivering bespoke career development workshops for bioscientists, including plant scientists, for over 10 years now and one of the main aims is to help people to help themselves. As well as providing practical information and advice on bioscience-related careers, job seeking strategies and career transition planning, I use interactive exercises and discussions to raise self-awareness. This involves recognizing the range of skills acquired through research, appreciating work values, linking interests with career choice and showing how personality plays a crucial role in effective communication and leadership. During the workshops, the participants complete a personal action plan identifying what they need to do to grow their own careers.
Firmly planted
Most people need to update and improve their CVs (even me!), hone their interview technique and perfect their self-presentation skills. But personal and professional development requires a range of different actions depending on career goals and intentions. Some PhD students want to continue on to do at least one postdoc and then decide whether to carry on after that. With quite a good number of posts available, and with some industry recruiters saying they prefer researchers with postdoc experience, this can be an excellent first step – but be careful to ensure you’re moving forward and building on your experience. Look at the career stories of early career researchers who were awarded this year’s prestigious SEB president’s medal – they relate strategies they have used to fill gaps in their expertise and to position themselves favorably to secure a permanent research leadership position. For researchers who are aspiring academics, their plans may include actions such as submitting an abstract to give a talk at a forthcoming conference, doing some strategic networking or finding a mentor to help them to apply for a fellowship.
Branching out
For those considering a non-academic career, their personal development will depend on which career sector they plan to move into. For example, arranging work shadowing or doing voluntary work can help shift your career towards your desired destination. I helped out at the career service during my job as assistant editor when I was based at Southampton University, giving me enough experience and a reference to break into this career. Internships can provide opportunities to spend time working in areas such as policy, outreach and publishing, and if you’re a budding science writer you can simply start up your own blog, or write on someone else’s – like this one! Everyone would benefit from setting up or improving their presence on social media, whether it’s Researchgate, LinkedIn or Twitter. These global networks help to raise your profile, provide information about companies and careers of interest, build relationships and even advertise jobs. Generic training in communication, networking, self-awareness and other personal effectiveness can help to improve everyone’s self-reliance and confidence.
A fertile future
So in answer to the question, “how do you grow a plant scientist?” I would say it depends on their field of interest and direction of growth. Never think of your PhD as the end of your learning – it’s another new beginning. Even PIs lack confidence in some important aspects of their work, such as securing research funding (see figure) and would likely benefit from training in this area, not to mention management and leadership. Growing plants is your business; without them you would make no progress, nor generate results on which to write your publications and build a career. Ignore your own personal growth and you might be in danger of going to seed!
This blog is a summary of the career workshop, organized and delivered by Sarah Blackford, at the recent FESPB/EPSO Congress 2016 in Prague.
Dr Sarah Blackford
Sarah Blackford started her career in plant science research at York University, moved into journal publishing with the Journal of Experimental Botany and then trained to be a professional higher education careers adviser. She is currently the Head of Education and Public Affairs at the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) and writes a regular blog for bioscience PhD students and postdocs: www.biosciencecareers.org
Here, Dr Kirkegaard, who was recently elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, describes the work of the National Water Use Efficiency Initiative and the exciting new discoveries made by farmers and scientists already being used to shape resilient cropping systems for the future.
Could you begin by explaining how and why the National Water Use Efficiency Initiative was established?
Despite the semi-arid conditions, rain-fed agriculture is by far the most common form of farming in Australia, especially for grain crops such as wheat and canola. The National Water Use Efficiency Initiative was established in 2009 by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), a research-funding organization that collects levies from farmers to support agricultural research. They provided $17 million over five years to growers and research organizations to tackle the challenge of increasing water use efficiency (the amount of grain produced per mm of rainfall) of grain farming systems by 10%.
Growers could suggest ways in which they believed this could be achieved and CSIRO scientists provided farming systems research assistance to test and validate the ideas and ensure a consistent and scientific approach was taken.
How has modeling been used to guide the research?
Pre-experimental modeling was used to determine which interventions looked most promising. This early modelling suggested there were huge opportunities to catch and store summer rainfall in better ways, and to sow crops earlier to utilize water more efficiently. Experiments were then designed to test and validate those ideas on-farm, in experiments run by the farmers in their own fields.
What synergies have you found between management practices in semi-arid agriculture?
Canola growing in New South Wales, Australia. Image credit: Jan Smith. Used under license: CC BY 2.0.
In wheat farming, we found that adopting a good crop rotation, controlling summer weeds, maintaining stubble cover and sowing earlier at lower crop densities was very successful. Capturing and storing water in the summer facilitates early sowing because crops can be planted without waiting for rain, and choosing a wheat variety that flowers at the right time makes best use of the seasonal rainfall. This combination of management and variety was very powerful, leading to a doubling in yield.
We are now investigating similar interactions in canola. Sowing canola early helps the plant to avoid heat and water stress at the end of the season, increasing its biomass production and grain yield potential, and improving its water use efficiency.
Vigorous wheat varieties may be able to choke out weeds, like this field poppy. Image credit: Tony Smith. Used under license: CC BY 2.0.
Have you discovered any other genotype x management (G x M) relationships, where a particular cultivar contributes to crop management?
Vigorous wheat varieties can have beneficial interactions with management. For example, more vigorous crops cover the ground quickly and reduce the direct loss of soil water through evaporation, and can improve water use efficiency. In addition, vigor can also make the wheat more competitive with weeds and provide a non-chemical form of weed control to reduce the overreliance on herbicides as part of an integrated weed management approach.
What advice do you have for researchers or breeders developing a new cultivar? How can they test its interaction with crop management?
In some cases, depending on the genetic change that is present in a new variety, there may be little interaction with management. However, large and obvious changes in crop traits, such as changes in crop vigor or root and shoot architecture, may interact strongly with numerous aspects of management (e.g. sowing date, sowing density, nutrient management, weed management). It would be wise to test some of these interactions before crop release, so that the new variety is released WITH a package of sound management strategies to maximize productivity.
Leaving stubble on a field maintains water and increases soil organic matter. Image credit: USDA NRCS South Dakota. Used under license: CC BY-SA 2.0.
How will the findings of the National Water Use Efficiency Initiative be built upon in the future?
I believe we have had an impact on the way research is approached. Rather than assume that a single intervention or new variety will have a large impact, people are now more interested in what packages of management and varieties will be most successful. It’s like always asking “what else do I need to add to my innovation to get the most out of it?” Testing some of the G x M interactions experimentally during the pre-breeding process may be a fruitful area to identify likely synergies well ahead of cultivar release.
Large increases in system productivity rarely come from a single transformational change; they arise when several interacting factors combine, such as in the first agricultural revolution in Europe, or the Green Revolution in India and Asia. New crop types combined with management packages to fulfil the higher potential is what made the difference. We need to envisage what combination might provide those synergies for the crops of the future and be sure we organize ourselves and capture those possibilities by NOT staying in comfortable discipline siloes.
So you’re hearing good things about the new plant science networking platform Plantae and want to get involved? You’ve come to the right blog post! Read on to learn how to set up your profile, find friends and get involved with the community.
Who are you?
Filling in your profile is easy!
Plantae is a great place to network with researchers around the world, so you’ll want your profile to be as detailed as possible.
As a minimum, add your name, a profile photo, your professional affiliations and a summary of who you are and what you do. This will help your colleagues and friends to find you, and break the networking ice with new connections!
What makes a good bio? Give the reader a little information about your fields of interest, background, plant science outreach, new papers, favorite plant, whatever you like (related to plants and plant science, of course!). Remember that Plantae is a professional networking site, so don’t put anything on there that you wouldn’t want your boss (current or future!) to see!
Where can I find out more about this interesting person?
Don’t forget to add your social media and researcher profiles
A great feature of the Core Profile is the ability to add your social media profiles, website, and enhance the visibility of your research by adding researcher profiles, for example your ORCID, Mendeley, or ResearchGate account. To ensure that the accounts connect properly, add the full URL of each profile, not just your account name.
Will you be my friend?
From the Community homepage you can choose to see the recent activity of your friends, but only if you’ve added them first!
How to add a friend on Plantae
To find colleagues, click on ‘Members’ and you can search for a name, or filter all members by city, state or country. Click on your friend’s name to go to their profile. On the left sidebar, you’ll see a button named ‘User Actions’, which when clicked brings up the option to add them as a friend. After they accept your request, you’re officially friends. Congratulations!
Branching out
Join a group to continue networking
Now you’ve added everyone you know, it’s time to connect with people that you don’t! Get over to the Discussion boards and let everyone know how you feel about the latest hot paper or public engagement scheme. Or you could join a Group of users who share your interests, location, or love of plant-themed poetry (disclaimer: the latter is currently not a Plantae group – feel free to start it!). It’s easy to join conversations or start one of your own.
There you have it. Now you know the basics, reach out to the Plantae network, get involved in exciting plant science discussions, make the most of funding and job opportunities, and, pretty please, fill in your profile!
Kon-nichiwa! (Hello!) I am Akiko Nakazaki, a PhD student studying plant molecular cell biology at Kyoto University in Japan.
I’m interested in plant defense – specifically the glucosinolate-myrosinase defense system, which is specific to Brassicales such as Arabidopsis thaliana. Glucosinolates are a group of secondary metabolites stored in separate cells to myrosinases, the enzymes that break them down. Upon tissue damage, the glucosinolates and myrosinases are released from their cells and combine. The glucosinolates are hydrolyzed to volatile repellent compounds such as isothiocyanates and nitriles.
When damaged, cells containing glucosinolate and myrosinase are ruptured, releasing their contents. The glucosinolate is broken down by the myrosinase into volatile compounds that repel herbivores
I was impressed by this ingenious and rational survival strategy! I want to reveal this defense system at the cellular level, and am researching it in Arabidopsis thaliana by performing microscopic observations, bioassays with insects, and so on.
A day in the lab
Are you interested in how PhD students from other countries spend their day in the laboratory? I am! Let me tell you about my typical day in the lab.
I wake up at 8:30am, and have morning coffee and toast for breakfast while reading a newspaper. Then, I get dressed and ride on my bicycle to the University. During the ride (about 10 minutes), I remind myself of the day’s schedule. I get to the lab at 10am and take my seat. All the members of the lab have their own desk and workbench. I turn on my computer and check my emails.
In the daylight, I basically do experiments and read papers. I start doing microscopic observations and lose track of time until I hear my stomach growling and realize that it is almost 2pm. I have lunch at the eating space in lab. In this room, there are always some lab members who are eating, discussing their research, playing social games, etc. After lunch, I report the result of my microscopic observations to my boss and we have a brief discussion about it.
Then, I return to my seat and realize the primers I ordered yesterday have arrived. I perform a PCR and prepare an agarose gel for electrophoresis. While I am waiting for the PCR to end, I search PubMed and Google Scholar for new papers to read. I load the PCR products to the gel and check that the PCR worked. In the evening, I allocate myself free time for doing more experiments, reading more papers, preparing research presentations, discussions, etc.
I’ve sought a more effective way to advance my research through trial and error. For example, when I started researching in the lab I was a little too ambitious, and planned my schedule too tightly. I sometimes felt tired and depressed when my research was not right on schedule, as is often the case. In these negative moods I couldn’t enjoy my work, so I adopted a schedule with more free time. Because of this change, I’ve come to be able to work flexibly and keep a positive frame of mind.
I’m home between 10pm and midnight. At home, I have a late dinner and take a good long soak in the bath (my favorite time of day!). I go to bed at 2am.
Free weekends!
On weekends I enjoy playing badminton, learning traditional Japanese dance and shopping. I try to make plans without lab work as much as I can, however I’m not able to do avoid it sometimes when I am struggling to get new data before academic conferences and progress reports. Leaving the lab allows me to get rid of stress and feel refreshed for a healthy next week. Furthermore, I devise ways to work more efficiently on weekdays, because I am required to take time off at the weekends.
Treasure every encounter
My boss always says, “It is important to value encounters with people and things.” It wasn’t until recently that I finally understood that message! I have found that experiments may not always work well, but when I look at it from a different angle, even experiments that haven’t gone the way I’d wanted could make me aware of something new and interesting. This awareness could also be brought about through discussions with others.
I am grateful for being able to receive this opportunity. Thank you.
Akiko Nakazaki is in the first year of her doctoral program in the Department of Botany, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Japan.
This week on the blog, Professor Sophien Kamoun describes his work on plant–pathogen interactions at The Sainsbury Lab, UK, and discusses the future of plant disease.
Could you begin by describing the focus of your research on plant pathogens?
We study several aspects of plant–pathogen interactions, ranging from genome-level analyses to mechanistic investigations focused on individual proteins. Our projects are driven by some of the major questions in the field: how do plant pathogens evolve? How do they adapt and specialize to their hosts? How do plant pathogen effectors co-opt host processes?
One personal aim is to narrow the gap between research on the mechanisms and evolution of these processes. We hope to demonstrate how mechanistic research benefits from a robust phylogenetic framework to test specific hypotheses about how evolution has shaped molecular mechanisms of pathogenicity and immunity.
Tree diseases such as sudden oak death, ash dieback and olive quick decline syndrome have been making the news a lot recently. Are diseases like these becoming more common, and if so, why?
It’s well documented that the scale and frequency of emerging plant diseases has increased. There are many factors to blame. Increased global trade is one. Climate change is another. There is no question that we need to increase our surveillance and diagnostics efforts. We’re nowhere near having coordinated responses to new disease outbreaks in plant pathology, especially when it comes to deploying the latest genomics methods. We really need to remedy this.
The wheat blast fungus recently hit Bangladesh. Could you briefly outline how it is being tackled by plant pathologists?
Wheat blast has just emerged this last February in Bangladesh – its first report in Asia. It could spread to neighboring countries and become a major threat to wheat production in South Asia. Thus, we had to act fast. We used an Open Science approach to mobilize collaborators in Bangladesh and the wider blast fungus community, and managed to identify the pathogen strain in just a few weeks. It turned out that the Bangladeshi outbreak was caused by a clone related to the South American lineage of the pathogen. Now that we know the enemy, we can proceed to put in place an informed response plan. It’s challenging but at least we know the nature of the pathogen – a first step in any response plan to a disease outbreak.
Which emerging diseases do you foresee having a large impact on food security in the future?
Obviously, any disease outbreak in the major food crops would be of immediate concern, but we shouldn’t neglect the smaller crops, which are so critical to agriculture in the developing world. This is one of the challenges of plant pathology: how to handle the numerous plants and their many pathogens.
As far as new problems, I view insect pests as being a particular challenge. Our basic understanding of insect–plant interactions is not as well developed as it is for microbial pathogens, and research has somewhat neglected the impact of plant immunity. The range of many insect pests is expanding because of climate change, and we are moving to ban many of the widely used insecticides. This is an area of research I would recommend for an early career scientist.
What advice would you give to a young researcher in this area?
Ask the right questions and look beyond the current trends. Think big. Be ambitious. Don’t shy away from embracing the latest technologies and methods. It’s important to work on real world systems. Thanks to technological advances, genomics, genome editing etc., the advantages of working on model systems are not as obvious as they were in the past.
How can we mitigate the risks to crops from plant diseases in the future?
My general take is to be suspicious of silver bullets. I like to say “Don’t bet against the pathogen”. I believe that for truly sustainable solutions, we need to continuously alter the control methods, for example by regularly releasing new resistant crop varieties. Only then we can keep up with rapidly evolving pathogens. One analogy would be the flu jab, which has a different formulation every year depending on the make-up of the flu virus population.
Potato with blight, caused by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans. Image credit: USDA. Used under license CC BY-ND 2.0.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I read that public and private funding of plant science is less than one tenth of biomedical research. Not a great state of affairs when one considers that we will add another two billion people to the planet in the next 30 years. As one of my colleagues once said: “medicine might save you one day; but plants keep you alive everyday”.
This week we bring you something a little different!
Four eighth grade students from The Nueva School in Hillsborough, California are releasing “They Grow”, a scienceified version of the popular Drake song “Headlines” (warning: Headlines contains explicit language!). In the video the students rap about photosynthesis, starting with the basics and moving on to the intricate processes of the light reaction and the Calvin cycle.
With help from their science teacher, Tom McFadden, these four students wrote and performed their lyrics, then planned, shot and edited their music video. Tom’s “Science Rap Academy” class meets twice a week for an hour each Tuesday and Thursday. The students have been working on this project since January and are very excited to finally release it to the world. They hope that their video will help students better understand the complex process known as photosynthesis.
Watch the video:
More from the students:
“I think that this song and video that we have created will help provide students learning about photosynthesis with a fun, engaging and relatable way to learn how plants grow,” – Alex, coproducer and rapper.
“This song brings energy into the classroom while effectively communicating the perplexing process of photosynthesis. I think that this song will be engaging and entertaining, and was a blast to film,” – Stanley, coproducer and rapper.
“Our number one goal with this song was to make learning about science, specifically photosynthesis, fun to learn. I think that we were able to achieve that by scienceifing a popular song that many kids know, so they can really connect to it. We also made the video and song easy to follow and understand so people of all ages can learn from it,” – Jason, coproducer and filmmaker.
“This entire process was very fun, writing and singing our lyrics and filming the video. I’m really thrilled to share this final product that we have been working hard on to the world and I hope that people enjoy it,” – Quincy, coproducer and rapper.
The Chelsea Flower Show is a world-renowned garden show held every year in May by the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society. There are exhibits of garden design, educational outreach, and exciting new varieties of ornamental plants, fruits and vegetables, with prestigious awards given for each category.
The Chelsea Flower Show, one of the biggest and best known horticultural shows in the world, took place on 24-28th May 2016. Some 150,000 visitors made their way to the Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, UK, to be wowed by innovative garden designs and especially by gorgeous flowers. Among other things, show-goers had the chance to learn the winner of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Plant of the Year award. This annual prize goes to the “most inspiring new plant” on display at the show – a high honor indeed given the number and range of varieties introduced each year.
The relentless pursuit of showy flowers for garden display extends back significantly further than the 104 years of the Chelsea show. One need only recall the infamous Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century to be reminded that fascination with floral novelties has a long and storied history.
Over the centuries, entrepreneurial cultivators have endeavored to create unique plant varieties, either by bringing together the genetic material from established lines through hybridization or through the discovery of new genetic variation such as a chance mutation in a field. Today, flower breeding is pursued with a far better understanding of plant biology than ever before, in some cases with the aid of technologies such as tissue culture and genetic transformation. Yet the goal remains the same: the creation of tantalizing tulips, ravishing roses, show-stopping snapdragons and myriad other plants that will ideally prove irresistible to gardeners and turn a handsome profit.
Chelsea Flower Show 2016. Andy Rain/EPA
The quest to produce profitable new varieties – and to do so as fast as possible – at times led to breeders to embrace methods that today seem strange. There is no better illustration of this than the mid-century output of one of America’s largest flower-and-vegetable-seed companies, W Atlee Burpee & Co.
Gardening with X-rays
In 1941, Burpee Seed introduced a pair of calendula flowers called the “X-Ray Twins”. The company president, David Burpee, claimed that these had their origins in a batch of seeds exposed to X-rays in 1933 and that the radiation had generated mutant types, from which the “X-Ray Twins” were eventually developed.
At the time, Burpee was not alone in exploring whether X-rays might facilitate flower breeding. Geneticists had only recently come to agree that radiation could lead to genetic mutation: the possibilities for creating variation “on demand” now seemed boundless. Some breeders even hoped that X-ray technologies would help them press beyond existing biological limits.
The Czech-born horticulturist Frank Reinelt thought that subjecting bulbs to radiation might help him produce an elusive red delphinium. Unfortunately, the experiment did not produce the hoped-for hue. Greater success was achieved by two engineers at the General Electric Research Laboratory, who produced – and patented – a new variety of lily as a result of their experiments in X-ray breeding.
Though Reinelt’s and other breeders’ tangles with X-ray technology resulted in woefully few marketable plant varieties, David Burpee remained keen on testing new techniques as they appeared on the horizon. He was especially excited about methods that, like X-ray irradiation, promised to generate manifold genetic mutations. He thought these would transform plant breeding by making new inheritable traits – the essential foundation of a novel flower variety – available on demand. He estimated that “in his father’s time” a breeder chanced on a mutation “once in every 900,000 plants”. He and his breeders, by comparison, equipped with X-rays, UV-radiation, chemicals, and other mutation-inducing methods, could “turn them out once in every 900 plants. Or oftener”.
Scientific sales pitches
A 1973 Burpee cover. Burpee, CC BY-NC-ND
Burpee’s numbers were hot air, but in a few cases plant varieties produced through such methods did prove hot sellers. In the late 1930s Burpee breeders began experimentation with a plant alkaloid called colchicine, a compound that sometimes has the effect of doubling the number of chromosomes in a plant’s cells. They exploited the technique to create new varieties of popular garden flowers such as marigold, phlox, zinnia, and snapdragons.
All were advertised as larger and hardier as a result of their chromosome reconfiguration – and celebrated by the company as the products of “chemically accelerated evolution”. The technique proved particularly successful with snapdragons, giving rise to a line of “Tetra Snaps” that were by the mid-1950s the best-selling varieties of that flower in the United States.
Burpee’s fascination with (in his words) “shocking mother nature” to create novel flowers for American gardeners eventually led him to explore still more potent techniques for generating inheritable variation. He even had some of the company’s flower beds seeded with radioactive phosphorus in the 1950s. These efforts do not appear to have led to any new varieties – Burpee Seed never hawked an “atomic-bred” flower – but the firm’s experimentation with radiation did result in a new Burpee product. Beginning in 1962, they offered for sale packages of “atomic-treated” marigold seeds, from which home growers might expect to grow a rare white marigold among other oddities.
Burpee was, above all, a consummate showman and a master salesman. His enthusiasm for the use of X-rays, chemicals, and radioisotopes in flower breeding emerged as much from his knowledge that these methods could be effectively incorporated into sales pitches as from his interest in more efficient and effective breeding. Many of his mid-century consumers wanted to see the latest science and technology at work in their gardens, whether in the form of plant hormones, chemical treatments, or varieties produced through startling new techniques.
Times have changed, 60-odd years later. Chemicals and radiation are as more often cast as threatening than benign, and it is likely that many of today’s visitors to the Chelsea Flower Show hold a different view about the kinds of breeding methods they’d like to see employed on their garden flowers. But as the continued popularity of the show attests, their celebration of flower innovations and the human ingenuity behind these continues, unabated.
On May 18th, botany geeks around the world shared their love of plants in this year’s Fascination of Plants Day! Here’s our round-up of some of the best #fopd tweets!
First things first, test your skills with this challenging plant science quiz:
Farmed fish are often fed with fishmeal, produced from the dried tissues of caught marine fish. In 2012, a total of 16.3 million metric tons of fish were caught to produce fishmeal and fish oil, 73% of which was used in aquaculture. This practice is unsustainable, and as the global human population is expected to rise to 9 over billion by 2050, capture fisheries will not be able to satisfy the demand for fish protein.
Barramundi fish
In recent decades there has been extensive research into ingredients to replace fishmeal, but this has focused mainly on sources of plant carbohydrate and protein such as maize and soy, which also serve as human foods. While these crops are now used in some commercial aquaculture feeds, they are not suitable for many species and have had less than optimal results. In addition, many countries do not grow these mainstream crops and are left in the undesirable position of having to import fishmeal alternatives, which can be cost prohibitive, and increase carbon emissions.
An alternative to fishmeal
Insect based fish feed
The Crops for the Future (CFF) team in Malaysia is working with the University of Nottingham, UK, to investigate insect-based aquaculture feed as a replacement to fishmeal use in fisheries. Both organizations recognize that current rates of wild fish depletion are unsustainable and will not meet future demand for fishmeal under a ‘business as usual’ scenario. With support from the Newton-Ungku Omar Fund Institutional Linkages Programme, they have shown that the quality of insect larvae as an aquafeed ingredient is affected by the substrate on which the insects feed.
The CFF ‘FishPLUS’ program has revealed that black soldier fly (BSF; Hermetia illucens) larvae fed with underutilized crops can be used to produce insectmeal and replace up to 50% of fishmeal in formulated aquaculture. These crops are not used for human food and can be grown on marginal land close to areas of aquaculture production in tropical climates, increasing the sustainability of the process.
Producing insectmeal with underutilized crops
Ground Sesbania is used to feed the black soldier fly larvae
Over a year, the researchers worked with a private sector supplier to develop laboratory-scale BSF breeding pods in which different substrate combinations of underutilized crops could be trialed. BSF feeding trials were conducted using five separate or combined underutilized crops as substrate, i.e. Sesbania (Sesbania sp.); 90% Sesbania with 10% Moringa (Moringaoleifera); Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea) leaf; Bambara groundnut flour; and Moringa leaf.
The best results were obtained by feeding the larvae on Sesbiana, a nitrogen-fixing legume that grows well in marginal tropical landscapes and is not a human food crop. Overall, nutrient analyses indicated that the amino acid profile for insectmeal is encouraging and closely resembles fishmeal.
Successful feeding trials
Black soldier fly larvae
Fish feeding trials using the BSF insectmeal were undertaken in Malaysia at the CFF Field Research Centre. The trial fish, barramundi, accepted a formulated feed with up to 50% replacement of fishmeal with Sesbania-fed BSF insectmeal. The feed conversion ratio, mortality rate and biomass growth rate were all comparable to control trials with commercial fishmeal aquaculture feed. Back in the UK, complementary antinutritional studies at the University of Nottingham contributed essential information to guide the development of an optimal aquaculture feed formulation in the future.
Waste not, want not
Amaranth growing with either commercial fertilizer (right) or FishPLUS substrate compost (left)
This project also embraces the use of undigested material from the insect feeding as compost for crops like okra and amaranth. For example, 10kg of Sesbania leaves produces 1kg of BSF pre-pupae and 9kg of undigested waste material. When used as a soil conditioner in our agronomy trial, this waste material improve the crop growth at a comparable level to commercial fertilizer. This could be used by terrestrial crop farmers to reduce their fertilizer bill.
The findings of this project are of importance to world food security. As leaders in this field of research, the UK and Malaysian partners are well placed to leverage these preliminary results and explore scalability and options for commercialization of benefit to both economies.
CFF is the world’s first and only organization dedicated to research on underutilized crops. Professor M.S. Swaminathan, World Food Prize Laureate and Father of the Asian Green Revolution, described CFF as `the need of the hour.’
You can see more about the FishPLUS project from Crops for the Future in the video below:
This article was written by FishPLUS Team, for Crops for the Future.
The Spanish Society of Plant Physiology (Sociedad Española de Fisiología Vegetal; SEFV) is a society for scientific professionals with an interest in how plant organs, tissues, cells, organelles, genes, and molecules function, not only individually but also through their interaction with the natural environment.
