Discovering the links between plants and medical treatments
Posted on 30 November 2009
Professor Sir David Baulcombe will use his lecture ‘Of maize and men or peas and people: the value of plants as model systems in molecular biology’ to consider how many of the fundamental discoveries in biology originated in research in plants.
He will also discuss the new opportunities made possible by the discovery of a class of small regulatory ribonucleic acids in plants described as the ‘dark matter‘ of genetics. These include better treatment and diagnosis of disease and the improvement of crop plants.
Sir David is Regius Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. A specialist in gene silencing and disease resistance, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and knighted in the 2009 Birthday Honours List for services to plant science.
This lecture is the third in this term's York Biology Lecture series which is supported by the University of York Distinguished Visitors Fund and the Department of Biology.
Admission to the lecture, on 2 December, is free and open to all. It will start at 12.15pm in room P/X001 in the Department of Physics.
ENDS
Notes to editors:
- The University hosts a series of public lectures covering a wide variety of subjects every year. A complete list is available at www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/.
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