Barbara Marten - 10.05.2017 11:58

What can be done to stop the declining biodiversity in agricultural landscapes?

Jill Farrant in ''How we can make crops survive without water'' by Giulia Palmacci LSP Assisi/Italy

This is the title of a TED talk by Jill Farrant that I listened to last month. 

Jill Farrant, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is the world’s leading expert on resurrection plants, which come back to life from a desiccated, seemingly dead state just 24 hours after being given even the tiniest drop of water. In fact, her main objective is to identify and replicate the genes that help these ‘resurrection plants’ defy death.

She became interested in resurrection plants as a child when she saw a dead plant flourish again after a rainfall

 Photos taken from Pixabay

Her purpose is to investigate the ability of many plant species to survive without water for long periods of time from the molecular, biochemical and ultrastructural point of view, using a unique comparative approach and working with many different species of resurrection plants and a variety of tissues. The ultimate goal is to find applications that will lead to the development of drought-tolerant crops to nourish populations in arid, drought-prone climates, notably in Africa, and her research may have medicinal applications as well. In fact,  she and her team at the University of Cape Town want to learn from nature’s wisdom and help provide food to billions of impoverished people worldwide. Her work deals with plants I haven’t heard of, but they could be the key to prevent famine in Africa. I think that 'resurrection plants' are not only a fundamental achievement in science because they can nourish people in the poorest part of the world, but it also should make  everyone reflect on the conditions of developing  nations.

Posted 07.06.2017 13:05

Esbjörn Stenberg - 13.06.2017 10:08

This is a really interesting topic. Resurrecting plants could make impossible things possible for families in the third world. This could very well be the solution we have been looking for. Our nature is amazing. We are looking for solutions and techniques, but our nature has already created them for us, we only need to understand it better to be able to solve our problems. Esbjörn