• Question: Does your work help protect our environment?

    Asked by Kate,Huan-Yu and Sophie to Jake, James, Pete, Senga, Simonne on 3 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by thebathbombgirls.
    • Photo: Senga Robertson

      Senga Robertson answered on 3 Nov 2017:

      Hi Kate, Huan-Yu and Sophie

      I’m really pleased to say that, yes, it will help protect our environment. This answer will be a bit long but hopefully it will all make sense. If you have any questions at all please just let me know 🙂

      So firstly, did you know that plants are a bit like humans?….Well they are in a way. Humans have a gut (your stomach, bowel etc) which is where we absorb water and nutrients from food, the gut also has literally millions and millions of microscopic creatures called bacteria living in it and they do really special, helpful jobs to keep us healthy like helping to protect us against bad bacteria that can make us sick or breaking nutrients down in to smaller pieces so that we can use them.
      Plants also have guts….sort of, Plants have roots that are underground in the soil. The roots absorb water and lots of nutrients from the soil and they also have millions of bacteria living around them that help the plant to stay healthy. My job is to find out what bacteria live around plant roots and to work out what cool jobs they do to help the plants. So I spend a lot of my time up to my elbows in mud or looking at petri dishes filled with bacteria (that are often quite smelly- you can see a photo of a plate on my profile page).

      The reason it’s important to understand the jobs bacteria can do to help plants is because just now farmers have to use lots of chemicals to help plants to grow and to stop them getting unwell, the problem with this is that these chemicals are really bad for the environment. I am trying to work out a way that we can give plants helpful bacteria so that they can get nutrients easily from the soil and don’t need farmers to use so much chemicals which will be better for the environment and might even mean that farmers will be able to grow crops in places where they don’t grow very well just now, like in some developing countries.

      Sorry that was such along answer but hopefully you found it interesting.

      Senga 🙂

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