The hidden half: a journey through plant-microbe-soil interactions

Thorunn Helgason, Chair in Ecology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh 

Wednesday 24th April, 1-2pm, Cottrell LTB4 and streamed on Teams (contact the seminar organiser for the Teams link).
This seminar is open to all staff, students and affiliates of the University of Stirling. The seminar is hosted by Biological and Environmental Sciences (BES). 

Who this might appeal to: This talk will cover plants, mycorrhizal fungi, interactions with soils and climate and land use, so it will be of broad interest to anyone is these fields. It will also be of interest to those interested in evolution and genetics and will to appeal to a fairly broad ecology/ environment minded audience.

Abstract: For the vast majority of plant species, what we observe in nature is not an individual plant, but a symbiotic phenotype – a combination of the plant host, and the symbiotic microbes that colonise it. The Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis, between the plant roots and a fungus, is ubiquitous, occurring in at least 2/3rds of land plants. Our ability to identify AM taxa, and their community composition has been transformed by the advent of readily available sequencing technologies, which continue to evolve. In this talk we will take a journey our work on the AM fungi, their plant hosts and the soils they live in, through forests and agricultural sites throughout the British Isles, closing with a reflection on how our understanding of these complex communities has changed in tandem with changes in technology.

Bio: Thorunn is Chair in Ecology, and Head of School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Edinburgh to take up the post in 2022, having completed her PhD there nearly 30 years before. In between, she spent 3 years as a plant taxonomist at the Natural History Museum, and 26 years as a researcher and academic at the University of York, where she was first introduced to the arbuscular mycorrhizas by Alastair Fitter. Her research focusses on understanding how microbes build healthy soils, and how we can use this knowledge in crop production and habitat conservation.