Domesticated plants: why do we eat some but not others? - Mark Chapman скачать в хорошем качестве

Domesticated plants: why do we eat some but not others? - Mark Chapman

We caught up with Dr Mark Chapman from the University of Southampton. Mark studies how wild plants become domesticated into the plant crops that we find in our supermarkets today. But with literally thousands of different edible plants available to us, why do we only eat a small handful of different species? 0:00 Introduction 0:26 Why have only some food crops been domesticated? 0:55 Career pathway 1:59 Working with PhD students Speaker profile: Mark is an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and has been so for 8 years. Prior to this Mark completed his PhD in St Andrews, and postdocs in Athens, Georgia, USA and Oxford. In his lab they have two main themes: speciation, adaptation and hybridisation in the wild, and domestication and crop evolution. More and more he is having problems differentiating the two, given that all the questions being answered about wild plants are clearly of relevance to the domestication questions (as hopefully will become clear in the talk). The lab’s work typically involves genomic and transcriptomic investigations and a sizeable amount of bioinformatics; although they make sure they never forget about what these plants look like, where they live and how they are affected by humans and the environment. Mark never really chose to work on plants, but he cannot imagine doing anything else now. The richness of the world is reliant on the plants around us (and the plants that we eat). Not only this, but each plant must grow and survive where their seed fell, they cannot walk, fly or otherwise select a better environment. This is perhaps one of the most amazing things about being a plant scientist.