Jane Langdale – Designing More Efficient Leaves

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Early land plants didn't have leaves. At a certain point, they evolved. In fact, the anatomy found in C4 leaves evolved 60 times, and leaves themselves evolved at least twice but probably no more than 6 times, essentially independently from one another. Now, this is a complex genetic change we're talking about. How did this happen? That's what Jane Langdale is trying to figure out.
The whole of Jane Langdale's research is about shoot development in plants. When a shoot develops, it can either turn into more stems, or into a leaf. The leaves then, more or less efficiently, convert sunlight into usable energy. The interesting thing is this: a small minority of plants have a specialized anatomy that allows them to convert sunlight more efficiently. The goal is to engineer that anatomy into crops like rice or wheat. "And if we could do that, then it's predicted that we could increase yield by about 50%."
Hit play to hear more about Jane Langdale's research. Subscribe, review, and if you can, consider donating some BitCoin. Every little bit helps.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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 printing
0:22.6	blockchain virtual reality and more this is richard jacobs with future tech podcast i have a very
0:30.0	esteemed guest dain langdale uh professor at oxford of plant biology plant genetics uh jane how you doing? I'm good. Thank you, Richard.
0:39.8	Yeah, thanks so much for coming. Would you just give a brief bio an introduction about, you know,
0:45.2	who you are and then we'll get into the work that you're doing? Sure. So I'm a professor in the
0:50.2	plant sciences department at the University of Oxford. I've been here for about 25 years,
0:55.2	actually. So I've been working in plant genetics and development for quite some time. But I actually
1:01.3	did my PhD in human genetics, so switched fields after that when I realized that plants were more
1:07.6	interesting to me. And so I teach and I do research in the university.
1:12.5	What's your latest project that's fascinating you right now that you're working on?
1:16.4	So essentially the whole of my research group works on aspects of shoot development in plants.
1:22.8	So particularly how leaves develop. And so one of the questions we ask is that when plants grow, they essentially, the shoots are what we call indeterminate.
1:33.7	They'll just keep on going, whereas leaves have what's known as a determinant developmental program.
1:39.4	So they have a defined destiny, a defined shape.
1:42.1	And that's a major switch in genetic mechanism to go from
1:46.5	indeterminate to determinate. And so we're interested in how that happens. And we're also
1:51.7	interested in how it evolved because the early land plants didn't have leaves. So that was a switch
1:57.7	that had to be acquired in order for leaves to evolve in the first place.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Richard Jacobs, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Richard Jacobs and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.