cell center

in the next few years population,human population, will be more than nine billion. now we have five billionpeople on this planet. so it is the necessary to figure outhow to feed, how to clothe, how to house this number, huge numberof people and preserve wilderness. the only way howthis is possible is to use ingenuity in science and technology, so that's whythe ascent of plant cell biology is important.

one of the goals we have right now isto produce, within the next twenty-five to thirtyyears, twice as much food for our world. the quests that we really had wason one hand to provide farmers with submergence tolerant rice, but on the other hand to understand the actual molecular mechanism that provides submergence tolerance.this is a really beautiful example of how we can go from the cell and the gene all the way to the plant breeder and to the farmer. where are we now? do we have to some new varieties of submergence tolerant rice? and the answer is yes.

some of the most devastating plantpathogens are fungi, and in terms of human health, there isa certain species of fungi that cause infections in humans, particularimmunocompromised patients. the goal of my research is to find or identify proteins that are required forinfection or causing disease, and to use these as targets forantifungal agents. so for the first time we can go into a filamentousfungus and mutate every gene remove each one one at a time. i thinkthe results will be far reaching though to be applied to the plant and animalpathogens.

the tiny rnas, the small rnas, that we are now studying, they are regulatory molecules. they act in almost all aspects of organisms' physiology and development. the absence of these small rnas wouldcause diseases and even death. my group does work on small rna methylation was also found to be universalin multicelular organisms. so once we understand the mechanismsof small rnas, we could harness the power of

small rnas to treat human diseases. my lab in particular is looking into both chemical and genetic approaches to improving a plant's ability to grow under, withless water. unless we develop the crops and the farming practices for sustainable agriculture, we're in big trouble longer term. and we already see the consequences ofdeficiencies in agriculture and

developing nations where people go hungry. that's how it's all interconnected, and that's why it's so exciting, becauseit's one chain, we're all in all of this together