Tag: Biological Sciences

Embedding Education for Sustainable Development into higher education: a successful case study at the University of Bristol

Posted on by amanda.woodman-hardy
Climate Fresk cards laid on a table
Climate Fresk cards laid on a table

Dr Andy Wakefield is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences. He’s been working closely with the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) team on undergraduate biology curriculum at the University of Bristol. Here he outlines the benefits this has brought to the department. 

Working with the ESD team has been valuable to the School of Biological Sciences. With their support we have made lots of progress to include sustainable development content in our undergraduate teaching. Their curriculum review process helped us take a step back, providing a broader sense of where the effort is being invested and where we may be missing out. Having recurring meetings also serves as a nice nudge. We now regularly revise the good ideas we have and what we are planning to do, as well as celebrate the positive things we’ve already done. 

One major advantage of the ESD team is the ESD Network of events we can attend. In Summer 2023 Professor Steve Simpson and I attended their Climate Fresk event, a 3-hour Climate Education workshop using facts from the IPCC Reports. This was my first time trying one of these workshops. At the end of the workshop, we both made pledges to include the Fresk in our curriculum, which we have now done. 

What encouraged me to take that step was the active nature of the session. I already had a lecture within my Ecology and Conservation unit that related to climate change and its causes and consequences for biodiversity and people. The Fresk uses the same concepts but presented them in a more active and immersive way than a traditional one-sided didactic lecture. Students now work collaboratively to critically discuss and map the causes and consequences of climate change and they seem to have a better appreciation for feedback loops; probably due to the task of drawing arrows to link the various cards within the game. The format is ready to go and very easy to facilitate. This is a much better format that fits with my pedagogy of active learning. 

We integrated the workshop in two stages. First, we embedded facilitator training within our Science Communication for a Better Planet MSc programme. These 17 Masters students then co-facilitated a large Fresk for 140 second-year Ecology and Conservation students. 

The Masters students reacted very well to our integration of this workshop. Their understanding of climate change has evolved, and they’ve improved their communication skills, particularly how to facilitate rather than teach as well as how to tailor their communication to specific audiences. 

As for the undergraduates who participate, they voluntarily stayed for the entire workshop which is always a good sign. However, some students were upset by the end of the game having discussed the various negative impacts upon people and planet. I use this a springboard for discussing eco-emotions, providing a good opportunity to talk about climate anxiety and eco-grief, but also eco-hope using case studies that show positive action/trajectories. Students have reacted very well overall, but it’s not without its challenges for staff/facilitators. 

In the past, this content was presented as a lecture or a set of online resources. These were solid but those formats missed opportunities for dialogue, student pledges and scope for motivation via collective action. Having the active, in-person workshop is a better format for engaging with climate science. 

As part of the Masters students’ assessments, we also partnered with the Bristol Cathedral Choir School with whom our MSc students t co-facilitated Fresks to pupils in years 7, 8 and 9,  reaching over 350 students. The school was very happy and have since shared with us that many of the parents had made positive comments about the education provision. 

This year, we are repeating these activities. Our Masters students have already facilitated a Fresk for undergraduate students in Week 14. During National Science Week, we also facilitated another (junior) Fresk at the Cathedral Choir school for another 150 students. We plan to continue this for as long as funding is available for training our MSc students. Some students from previous cohorts have even facilitated their own Fresks outside of the university for local charities.   

The ESD team supported us in integrating Climate Fresks by helping us to arrange training for our students, ensuring we had the right contacts, and providing aftercare support and facilitator resources. They have a Teams group for facilitators and can help with resources and guidance for setting up your own events and training. 

In future, we are also considering integrating carbon literacy training (led by Lucy Westover in the Medical School), which could help students gain sustainability-related jobs as well as challenge the assumption that academics in our School understand climate science.

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This blog is written by Dr Andy Wakefield and edited by Josie Maskell.

Find out more about Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Bristol.

Taking basic research to application: Using light quality to improve herb growth

Posted on by janet.crompton
Coriander has a distinctive flavour and is popular in dishes such as curry. (Image By Deeptimanta (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Coriander is the UK’s top-selling culinary herb, an industry worth £18 million a year. However, maintaining high standards of product quality is expensive and can lead to lots of plants being rejected before they make it to supermarket shelves. One of the key objectives for the potted herb industry is the production of compact plants with dark green leaves, but the plants that consumers end up with often do not conform with this ideal and can appear leggy and weak.

Plants compete for light by growing taller

Plants go to extraordinary lengths to maximise their light capture for photosynthesis. When plants grow close together however, they compete for resources and one resource that becomes limited in closely spaced plants is light due to mutual shading.

Shade has a negative impact on a plant’s health as it limits the light that a plant can use for photosynthesis. But unlike animals, which can move to new areas once space, water or food becomes limited, plants are immotile and have evolved unique strategies to compete for and maximise light capture. Chief among these is the shade avoidance syndrome. Incredibly, plants anticipate that they are at risk of being shaded even before they actually are shaded through the detection of local light quality – the depletion of red and blue light and the relative enrichment of longer wavelengths of light due to the absorption and reflection properties of vegetation. The shade avoidance syndrome is triggered in response to this change in light quality and the most dramatic changes in plant form involve the elongation of stems and the raising of leaves so as to move light capturing organs into sunlight.

Elongation does have drawbacks however – resources are diverted away from seed, chlorophyll and leaf production; there is also an increased risk of lodging (where plants fall over due to over-elongation making them unable to support their organs), which puts a limit on how densely we can plant crops before they over-compete with each other and it impacts yields.

UV-B suppresses elongation

On the other hand, plants have mechanisms in place to prevent over-elongation. These are often related to light-quality as well and one such mechanism is the sensing of UV-B wavelengths.

Classical Ultra-Violet research on plants has focused on the damaging effects that this shorter wavelength, higher energy light can have on DNA, or cell structure through production of reactive oxygen species. These UV-B wavelengths are beyond our visible range, but plants have specific photoreceptors that can detect UV-B and trigger a signaling cascade that will lead to the accumulation of sun screening compounds as well as architectural changes. Indeed, it is now clear that the plant responses to UV-B are not only a reaction to UV-B damage, but also a specific response to the sensing of UV-B (read more on this on the UV4Plants society website).

A finding that emerged from our laboratory in Bristol was that the elongation that plants exhibited in crowded conditions could be suppressed with the addition of UV-B to their light conditions (Hayes et al., 2014). UV-B is a component of direct sunlight, so an interpretation of this adaptation is that plants use UV-B as a signal that they are in direct sunlight and hence no longer need to elongate to escape shade.

Applying our research to the glasshouse

Armed with this new knowledge of plant responses to light, we are collaborating with a major potted herb grower to improve their product quality. A problem with glasshouse grown coriander in the winter months is that they grow long and spindly. Often these herbs are planted densely with around 60 seedlings per pot – conditions that are conducive to shade avoidance. Short days and cloud cover during winter further contribute to over-elongation. To compound this, many materials used in glasshouse construction such as glass or clear acrylic filter out UV-B radiation. Thus, plants growing in these conditions are no longer receiving the UV-B brake on elongation that they would be if they were growing outdoors. If we restore this brake by using artificial UV-B light sources then we could solve this problem. We’ve started trialing UV-B treatments this summer and early results look promising. However, we need to wait until winter to collect our most informative data as in summer, with bright and long days, coriander plants grow far more compact than in winter.

Both pots were planted at the same density, the coriander on the left were grown in normal conditions while the coriander on the right were supplemented with UV-B radiation.

Hayes S, Velanis CN, Jenkins GI, Franklin KA. UV-B detected by the UVR8 photoreceptor antagonises auxin signalling and plant shade avoidance. Proc Natl Acad U.S.A. 2014. 111(32):11894-9

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Donald Fraser who is a PhD student in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bristol, he is studying plant responses to light and the circadian clock.

Clean cassava to solve brown streak problem?

Posted on by janet.crompton

Since arriving in Uganda, I’ve been learning a lot about the affects of Cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), which is devastating cassava production and threatening food security. The disease is spread by the whitefly insect, which picks up the virus from an infected plant and carries it to neighbouring healthy plants.

Cassava plants are grown by planting stem cuttings in the ground, which go on to become new plants. If farmers use cuttings from infected plants, the new plants will also become infected. This is a big problem, as infected cuttings can be transported to new areas, spreading CBSD across large distances.

What can be done?

Tolerance

Huge efforts are being put into a number of different solutions. These include breeding new cassava varieties, which are tolerant to CBSD. This is a very long and challenging process, as cassava plants also need to be resistant to Cassava mosaic disease (CMD) and have yield/taste properties which farmers and consumers prefer.

The National Crops Resources Research Institute (NaCRRI) has recently developed a new variety: NAROCASS1, which is tolerant to CBSD and resistant to CMD. This is now being used in areas where CBSD is particularly common and severe. Unfortunately, even tolerant cassava varieties can contain CBSD viruses and so it’s vital that farmers have access to clean cuttings.

Cassava variety NAROCASS1 with CBSD tolerance and CMD resistance.

Clean seed system (CSS)

The cassava CSS project in Uganda is run by NaCRRI and involves picking the very youngest tip of the cassava plant to produce embryonic tissue, which develops into a new plant. These plants are then checked to see whether the CBSD virus is present before being taken to nurseries where they are carefully multiplied and eventually used for clean planting material for farmers. As you can imagine, this process takes a long time and is much more expensive than taking cuttings from a mature cassava plant. However it means that farmers can benefit from quality assurance that the cuttings they buy are virus free and stand the best chance of remaining healthy.

A clean cassava plantlet produced through tissue culture.

The cassava CSS project has been running as a pilot for three years. It will be very interesting to hear how this project goes, as it’s likely to be a major solution to the CBSD problem.

Reviewing progress

Last week I had helped take minutes for the annual CSS review at NaCRRI, which involved lots of manic typing and concentration! As part of the review I got to visit a field where an entrepreneur is growing clean cassava plants. The plants certainly looked healthy, with no CBSD and CMD symptoms at all. With so much to think about, we still found time to have a cocktail party to let of some steam!

Clean cassava seed entrepreneur David Mpanga explains how he uses record keeping to track of outgoings and income.
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This blog has been written by University of Bristol Cabot Institute member Katie Tomlinson from the School of Biological Sciences.  Katie’s area of research is to generate and exploit an improved understanding of cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) to ensure sustainable cassava production in Africa.  This blog has been reposted with kind permission from Katie’s blog Cassava Virus.

 

Katie Tomlinson

More from this blog series:  

Cassava virus: Journey from the lab to the field – Settling in to Ugandan life

Posted on by janet.crompton

Katherine Tomlinson from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol Cabot Institute, is spending three months in Uganda looking at the cassava brown streak virus. This virus dramatically reduces available food for local people and Katherine will be finding out how research on this plant is translating between the lab and the field.  Follow this blog series for regular updates.

I arrived late on Thursday night and spent the weekend getting acquainted with the hustle and bustle of Kampala life. I visited the impressive Gadafi mosque, cathedral, and food markets, which are full of just about every fruit and vegetable you could imagine.

On Friday, I met with my internship supervisor, Dr. Titus Alicai who is the leader of the Root Crops Research Programme at the National Crops Resources Research Institute (NaCRRI); he filled me on some of the exciting activities I’ll be taking part in, including visits to cassava field sites.

I was picked up and taken to NaCRRI in Namulonge on Sunday, stopping off at markets along the way to pick up my food supplies. I am lucky to have Everline looking after me; she’s helping me to settle into Ugandan life. NaCRRI is absolutely beautiful, it’s full of crops including cassava, sweet potato, mango, pineapple, banana, and there are even vervet monkeys running around.

National Crops Resources Research Institute, Uganda… where I’ll be spending the next three months!

At the start of the week , I was given a tour of the institute including the labs where they analyse cassava tubers for nutritional and chemical content; a vital part of the process in developing crops which not only offer maximum disease resistance, and yield but also taste good.

I then visited the molecular biology labs, where they analyse crop samples for the presence of Cassava brown streak disease viruses. This was very familiar with similar equipment to our lab at the University of Bristol. The lab manager discussed the challenges of obtaining all the expensive reagents required and how this affects their work. Other challenges include intermittent power supply, which means they need a stack of battery packs to back up the -80 freezers and PCR machines. I am looking forward to spending some time here, to learn more about the similarities and differences between molecular work in the UK and Uganda.

On Wednesday, I went to the field with some University internship students, who were scoring cassava plants for Cassava brown streak disease and Cassava mosaic disease symptoms. After their training these students will be able to advise farmers about the diseases in their local areas. It was also my chance to see symptoms in the field, where infected leaves showed a distinctive yellowing pattern.

Inspecting cassava plants for disease symptoms with University internship students

I spoke to one student who has a small farm and has experienced Cassava brown streak disease first hand. He mentioned that the disease is very common in his area, and here even tolerant cassava varieties become infected and their tubers ruined.

Characteristic Cassava brown streak disease symptoms on cassava leaves

Today I am meeting with the communications team, to find out about the projects I will be involved with, including an outreach programme with farmers surrounding the NaCRRI site to encourage them to use crop breeds developed by the institute, which offer higher disease resistance.

That’s it for now I’ll be writing another update next week so watch this space! In the meantime if you have any questions please get in touch via Twitter: @KatieTomlinson4.

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This blog has been written by University of Bristol Cabot Institute member Katie Tomlinson from the School of Biological Sciences.  Katie’s area of research is to generate and exploit an improved understanding of cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) to ensure sustainable cassava production in Africa.  This blog has been reposted with kind permission from Katie’s blog Cassava Virus.
Katie Tomlinson

More from this blog series:  

Getting ready to go… cassava virus hunting!

Posted on by janet.crompton

Katherine Tomlinson from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol Cabot Institute, is spending three months in Uganda looking at the cassava brown streak virus. This virus dramatically reduces available food for local people and Katherine will be finding out how research on this plant is translating between the lab and the field.  Follow this blog series for regular updates.

It’s just three days until I set off on my trip to Uganda, where I’ll complete an internship with the National Crops Resources Research Institute in Namulonge. I’ll be working for three months with their Communications team to learn how research is translated between the lab and the field.  I am currently a BBSRC South West DTP PhD student at the University of Bristol, researching how cassava brown streak disease viruses spoil cassava tubers and dramatically reduce available food for local people.

Image above shows Katherine inspecting cassava plants for cassava brown streak disease symptoms in the School of Biological Sciences GroDome.

Cassava plants produce carbohydrate rich root tubers and are a staple food crop for approximately 200 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. After rice and maize, cassava is the third most important source of carbohydrates in the tropics. Unfortunately, cassava is prone to viral infections, including cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), which can render entire tubers inedible. CBSD outbreaks are currently impacting on the food security of millions of cassava farmers in east Africa; it appears to be spreading westward, threatening food security in many countries.
Spoiled cassava tubers due to cassava brown streak disease (photo credit: Dr. E. Kanju, IITA).
Working the lab, I regularly infect plants with CBSD viruses to study how they replicate, move and prevent plant defence responses. However, in the field there is a much more complex interplay of different viral strains, cassava varieties, white fly population dynamics and environmental conditions which all contribute towards the disease. It’s vitally important that information about all of these contributory factors is shared between scientists and farmers to help control the disease and inform future research.I’m looking forward to assisting with field trials where different cassava varieties are being tested for resistance and meeting the farmers who face the challenges of controlling the disease. I hope to learn how information is shared and distributed and get some research ideas for when I return. I’ll be blogging my experiences on my personal blog and for the Cabot Institute blog.

NaCRRI is in Namulonge, in the Wakiso district of Uganda (photo credit: Slomox, Wikimedia).

Preparation, preparation, preparation…

At the moment, there are a lot of ‘to do’s; making sure I’ve had all the necessary vaccinations, packed factor 50 sun cream, mosquito net, DET and a massive first aid kit! It seems a little over the top at the moment but should stand me in good stead for the adventure ahead…
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This blog has been written by University of Bristol Cabot Institute member Katie Tomlinson from the School of Biological Sciences.  Katie’s area of research is to generate and exploit an improved understanding of cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) to ensure sustainable cassava production in Africa.  This blog has been reposted with kind permission from Katie’s blog Cassava Virus.

 

Katie Tomlinson

More from this blog series:  

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