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| Description: | TALK ANNOUNCEMENT in the framework of “Agri-Food Masterclass on Entrepreneurship, FORTH, Heraklion, June 6-8, 2018” Title: “Agrifood research for a sustainable agriculture and food production” Speaker: Assoc. Professor Panos Sarris1,2 Affiliation: Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, FORTH, GR Place: Main Amphitheater “G. Lianis”, FORTH’s bldg. Date:08/06/2018 Time: 12:30 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Abstract: One of the major challenges facing humankind in the 21st century is how to feed a growing population that may exceed 9.5 billion people by 2050. This needs to be done using the same or even less natural resources, because water and land are used in the increasing urbanisation of the world. This implies that plant productivity needs to increase dramatically and that preventing crop losses from diseases will therefore be crucial to ensuring global food security. Plant diseases, caused by pathogenic microorganisms, reduce the yield of the world’s most important food crops, causing loss up to 40% of their annual production. One of the main reasons that plant diseases continue to cause such damage is that disease resistance introduced by plant breeding, in some cases, is rapidly overcome by newly virulent pathogens. This problem is amplified by intensive crop cultivation techniques and mono-culture. Likewise, the loss of the genomic diversity during the transition from wild to cultivated crop populations, enhances this problem. In order to minimize crop losses due to plant diseases we need new knowledge regarding the mechanisms underpinning microbe recognition by plants. This requires, from one hand, to understand the biology of microbial pathogenesis and the virulence compounds they target into host cells to cause disease. From the other hand, to elucidate the mechanisms by which the resistant plants successfully defend themselves from attack. Only in this way can host immunity mechanisms be predictably manipulated to provide durable disease control. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, FORTH, GR 2School of Biological Sciences, University of Exeter, UK |
| Status: | Waiting for approval |
| Date: | Friday, June 8, 2018 |
| Time: | 12:30 EEST |
| Priority: | 5-Medium |
| Access: | Public |
| Created by: | Lila Kalogeraki |
| Updated: | Monday, June 4, 2018 14:30 GMT |