The Hidden Half - A journey through plant, microbes and soil interactions скачать в хорошем качестве

The Hidden Half - A journey through plant, microbes and soil interactions

The speaker is Professor Thorunn Helgason, University of Edinburgh. For the vast majority of plant species, what we observe in nature is not an individual plant, but a symbiotic phenotype – a combination of the plant host, and the symbiotic microbes that colonise it. The Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis, between the plant roots and a fungus, is ubiquitous, occurring in at least 2/3rds of land plants. In this talk, I will take you on a personal journey through my work on the AM fungi, their plant hosts and the soils they live in, in forests and agriculture, throughout the British Isles. Thorunn is Chair in Ecology, and Head of School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Edinburgh to take up the post in 2022, having completed her PhD there nearly 30 years before. In between, she spent 3 years as a plant taxonomist at the Natural History Museum, and 26 years as a researcher and academic at the University of York, where she was first introduced to the arbuscular mycorrhizas by Alastair Fitter. Her research focuses on understanding how microbes build healthy soils, and how we can use this knowledge in crop production and habitat conservation.