Seminar 1: Prof. David Canella, ULB
The new generation of plant vaccines and biostimulants for sustainable and smart agriculture: a lignocellulose biorefinery renaissance
Abstract: The biorefinery of bioresources (wrongly considered as waste), is the pivotal step at the centre of any bio-industry around which all the other bioprocessing are designed. Despite being central to several technological investments from EU in the last 2 decades, the biorefinery sector had difficulties to establish since linked to the production of low value and cheap bioethanol, used as biofuels. Things radically changed when new generations of bio-products emerged: advanced-biomaterials, biodegradable plastics, bioactive compounds only to name few. Biorefinery-derived plant bio-stimulants in form of edible oligosaccharides, including those derived from cellulose, chitin, and pectin, has gained considerable attention for its dual role in promoting plant growth and enhancing plant immunity, beside being human compatible and totally environmentally safe and sustainable.
New fundamental discoveries had pointed to the enzymes currently used for the industrial biorefinery being also common to the pathogens that usually attack plants and crops, envisaging a possible further uses of their products in alerting plant defences. In particular, Lytic Polysaccharide Monooxygenases (LPMOs), highly conserved across biological kingdoms, are key enzymes used by phytopathogens to degrade cellulose polymers. In plants, these cellulose-derived products generated through LPMO enzymatic activity mimic pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), triggering innate immunity and Systemic Acquired Resistance (SAR). This latter is a defence mechanism that provides long-lasting protection against a broad spectrum of pathogens. The unique feature of this oligosaccharides so derived is their oxidation at one of the terminal sugar molecules, that leads to alternative signalling in plants. Instead of passing through the usual inter-tissue hydrogen peroxide ROS-burst, they induce a short-lasting induction of the volatile ethylene hormone, able at transmitting the signal to distal parts of the same plant or neighbouring plants. Such new feature could be used for designing of new smart delivery devices able at covering larger part of the fields using less of the bio-stimulating molecules.
Seminar 2: BrIAS Junior Fellow Dr. Luca Rossini
The future of model-driven insect pest control
Abstract: Insect science, mathematics, metrology… and control engineering! Even if they might look far from each other, these fields of research are, surprisingly, good friends. The mathematical description of the natural phenomena is, in fact, one of the main priorities in precision agriculture, as models are the core of decision support systems. Insect pests and disease are the main cause of yield reduction, while pest control methods substantially increase production costs. This seminar provides, in the first part, an overview of the main modelling techniques to describe terrestrial arthropods, highlighting the main challenges that this field of research is facing. The second part, instead, will provide an overview on how to move towards the applications and why we need to connect ecological modelling, control engineering, and metrology.
