Question: Will your work help the environment??? Will it also help to explore space?

Senga Robertson answered on 3 Nov 2017:

Hi Gena and Kieran

that’s a really great question!

Wouldn’t it be awesome to do something that helps the environment and you could also explore space? I would LOVE that! Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be exploring space any time soon BUT my work will help our environment.

This will be quite a long answer but hopefully I will explain properly what I do. If it doesn’t make sense please just tell me 🙂

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 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 my answer was so long, I hope you found it interesting though. Any other questions please just ping me a question.

Thanks

Senga 🙂