Dr. Stephen Long – Adapting Plants to Global Change

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you feed 7 billion people? How do you grow that much food? That's the question that confronts plant biologists. Over the past sixty years, our understanding of genetics has allowed us to increase yield of crops hugely. This, by taking an edible plant, and increasing the relative biomass of the part you can eat—a bigger grain of rice, for instance. Or a bigger bean from a soybean plant.
But as the world population continues to grow, and change, researchers like Dr. Stephen Long are looking for more ways to grow more food, more quickly.
Plants with high "photosynthetic efficiency" (PE) are plants that efficiently convert sun energy into plant biomass. Understanding and improving PE has been the object of Dr. Long's whole career. Most plants average a surprisingly low PE: 1%. Even high-PE plants only get up to 3%. Long sees an opportunity to up that number to 9% by editing the genes of plants
Tune in to hear more about Dr. Long's research. Subscribe, review, and if you can, consider donating a few BitCoins to the cause.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Almost Here, Round the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.
0:07.9	Future Technologies always to transform our lives for better or worse are the focus of this podcast.
0:13.6	Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used.
0:17.7	We're just around the corner.
0:19.7	From Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D around the corner, from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence,
0:22.0	3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more.
0:25.6	This is Richard Jacobs with Future Tech Podcast, and I have a pretty prestigious guest today.
0:31.2	Dr. Stephen Long, he has so many accolades that's really better to have him tell it and introduce
0:36.7	himself. But Dr. Long,
0:38.2	how are you doing? Good. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for coming. Would you give
0:43.2	listeners just a brief sketch of your background and then we'll talk about the major work that
0:48.9	you're doing currently? Sure. I trained in agriculture at the University of Reading, and then I studied for my PhD at the University of Leeds in Britain on environmental physiology of plants.
1:04.1	I worked for a while in industry with Tate and Lyle in their research division, and then I moved on to the University of Essex in England as a faculty member.
1:16.6	And a lot of the work I was doing there was really looking at plants which had very high photosynthetic
1:23.6	efficiencies, i.e. they could convert sunlight energy into plant biomass efficiently,
1:30.5	trying to understand how they did it, and also their ability to do it under stressful conditions,
1:37.8	particularly low temperature, and then later on aspects of global change.
1:52.7	I moved to the University of Illinois in 1999, which has always been the center for photosynthesis research,
1:59.8	where I could really then focus on my particularly interest of how we might be able to make plants photosynthetically more efficient and how we might
2:03.0	be able to use that in adapting plants to global change.
2:07.1	When you say make plants more photosynthetically efficient, how much more efficient have you
2:11.5	seen is out there in the wild? And what would be the benefit of doing it? It's probably
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