Name
Evolution of Plants: From Field to Factory
Date & Time
Thursday, October 31, 2019, 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Speakers
Description
Terrestrial plants have evolved and thrived for over 400 million years on Earth. Their survival in often harsh environments is due to the evolution of flexible and resilient metabolisms, exquisite sensing and signaling networks and rapid protective and repair processes. Out of the 300,000 known edible plants, only 12 plants generate 75 percent of the world’s food with rice, maize and wheat contributing to over 60 percent of this. For the past 10,000 years crop plants have been bred and selected for growth in the field rather than for phytochemicals (i.e. functional foods and medicine), and for the past 50 + years crops used in controlled environment agriculture have been selected to grow under green enriched HID (i.e. HPS and MH) supplemental lighting. Over a decade of research on the effects of LED lighting on a variety of crop plants will be presented as well as a new approach to how we look at and describe plant responsive-light. The future approach to optimizing light as an information source for crops will also be discussed.