 Thank you very much, Jane, for that very kind introduction. Firstly, I would like to start by thanking the Royal Society and the Committee for this fantastic award. It really is a great honour to receive the Rosalynn Franklin Award and have this opportunity through this award, this evening, to share with you this lecture. Today I want to focus on how we tackle plant disease outbreaks or epidemics. Just like you and I, plants are attacked by diseases, and are caused by all sorts o gwylltau, yn ymddangos ar gyfer y bactaurea, yng nghyrchu, a'r gwylltau ffazifungu, a yna bach oherwydd y byddai cyfnodau. Ond yna, rwy'n gweithio'n ffocws ar y ffungal yng nghyrchu ymddangos, ac yn ymddangos ar y cyfnodau sydd yma, yn y trael o'r cyfnodau syddol syddol, sydd ar y ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n .. reasonably strong food for the soul and it is well known as Wheat. Wheat is the top three staple crops grown worldwide. It's rolling the human diet can be traced back to over ten thousand yeas ago. Wheat cereal grains are exceptionally versatile. We create more foodstuffs such as bread, cake, pasta, and even beer. from wheat grains than any removing grain. than any other crop, and protecting and enhancing wheat productivity over the past 10,000 years really helped to contribute to the development of modern society. But sadly, both ancient and modern wheat crops are ravaged every year by a dangerous serial killer known as the wheat rusts. And so these wheat rusts, they destroy every year globally around 15 million tonnes of wheat, which is an annual loss of around 2.9 billion US dollars. And so this sounds like a really big number. And indeed this is quite a big number, because if we now put that into context, the amount of wheat destroyed by these serial killers, if we took all of that wheat and we just used it to bake bread, this would be enough wheat to bake 25 billion loaves of bread and enough bread to satisfy the annual consumption of 425 million people, or even over half the population of Europe. And as we look to the future, over just the next 10 years, it's thought that wheat consumption is going to increase by around 11%. And so you can see that curtailing the trail of destruction caused by these serial killers could really help to close that missing production gap and ensure that we can feed our expanding population. And so how do we outsmart a serial killer and protect our grain harvest both today and for future generations to come? Well here we can actually turn to the pillars of disease management that we all became so very familiar with during the COVID pandemic and underpin human health governance, a framework that equally applies to human, animal and plant health. And the first step of course is to prevent disease outbreaks from occurring and the way we do that is to make sure that we have a really good understanding of all the biological and environmental risk factors that can lead to a disease outbreak. And then of course we need really good detection mechanisms in place to make sure that we can rapidly detect the disease as soon as it occurs and then finally have effective response measures in place to address these threats once they start to spread. And so now if we firstly consider the prevention of disease epidemics I think here to firstly appreciate just how far human knowledge has come regarding our understanding of what causes plant diseases. We have to turn our attention to our ancient counterparts and their reliance on the supernatural religion and natural philosophy that underpinned our understanding of plant disease outbreaks until very recent human history. And so now if we take a journey back into the ancient world, in the ancient world the Greeks and the Romans they had the rust gods and these acted like supernatural plant pathologists for the Greeks they had the Apollo of rust and in ancient Rome they had the rust god Robigus and each year they would worship these rust gods and in ancient Rome they also had a festival known as the Robigalia Festival that was thought to have been established around 700 BC and it was celebrated each year on the 25th of April and during that celebration they would sacrifice red haired animals to appease the rust god Robigus and hopefully then protect their crops from these wheat rusts and ensure a bountiful harvest. Unfortunately this strategy didn't really work so the serial killers then continued to destroy wheat production and that then drew the attention of many ancient philosophers including of course the famous philosopher Aristotle who was one of the first scholars to articulate or at least recorded to articulate the theory around spontaneous generation where he believed that non-living beings created living beings and during this time he also talked about the wheat rusts and he thought the disease he saw out there in the fields was created from warm vapours that spontaneously turned into the disease in the field. The facts we know today that these diseases are caused by fungal organisms is something that these early philosophers just couldn't even comprehend and then over the next few centuries understanding around what caused the disease really changed very gradually until the age of enlightenment in the 18th century and this is when during the 1700s the first scientific name was given to these wheat rusts and they were called Puxinia and Puxinia is a term that we still use as scientists today but even if you look at the definition where they recorded this first scientific name they didn't record it as a fungus they actually recorded it as a plant a plant that infected plants and it was only until the fantastic work of Hendrik Anton de Barry conducting experimental work to show that finally we would know that parasitic fungi do actually cause plant disease and Hendrik Anton de Barry also then went on and resolved many of the complexities of the infection cycles of many of these complex fungal organisms but this was a monumental moment for plant pathology just establishing that fungi can cause plant disease but today we now know that these wheat rusts they aren't just one flavor we actually have three different fungi that we term the wheat rusts and those three different fungi are very closely related to one another but they actually cause three distinct diseases they cause leaf rust stem rust and yellow rust all diseases of wheat and for this part of the lecture I just like to focus on wheat stem rust and I'd also like to return to the fantastic work of Hendrik Anton de Barry in deciphering the complexity and the beauty of the infection cycle of this wheat stem rust fungus and this is a very complex infection cycle actually this fungus is able to infect not just wheat but also another unrelated host plant and so it infects both wheat and also this Barbary plant and many different types of Barbary the one that I'm showing here is known as common Barbary and it's during the summer months that this fungus likes to infect wheat plants and you can see here on the stem of this plant this orangey area this is typical of stem rust infection of this plant and if we then look in at this particular pustules that have formed on the surface of the stem you can see that they're filled with these ball like structures these spiky ball like structures and these are the spores of this fungus and these spores are created and they fall out of these pustule structures and then they blow on the wind moving the disease from one wheat plant to the next but then at the end of the summer of course our farmers go out into our wheat fields and they harvest this crop at this point of course the fungus was really enjoying its tasty meal it's not very happy that the wheat plants are now being harvested and so what does this fungus do well it changes its form and it goes to sleep and it sleeps out there on the stubble that's left behind in the wheat fields or it sleeps in the edges of the field margins on grasses and it sleeps there happily throughout the winter months in the cold temperatures that we see here in the UK and it's only that it awakens in the spring at the first flush of leaves that occur on the Barbary bush and then this fungus awakens and then it infects this Barbary bush and you can see here this orange type area which is typical symptoms of stem rest infection on the Barbary plant and again now if we zoom in to that structure on the underside of this leaf you can see it's full of these tube like structures and these tube like structures once again they're filled with those balls but this time different types of balls and those little balls are their spores again and those spores they don't go on to reinfect the Barbary bush that isn't their purpose instead they're created to spread the disease back into the wheat crop and these spores move into neighbouring wheat crops and spread the disease further and the fact that Barbary bushes can play such an important role in the life cycle or the infection cycle of this wheat stem rust fungus meant that throughout history there was a lot of legislation and restrictions and exclusion campaigns to remove Barbaries from great swathes of different countries to try to get it out of wheat growing areas and so we saw legislation introduced in many countries in Europe also in America and in Canada and so one of the campaigns that was really well documented is the campaign that occurred in North America and this these are just some of the leaflets and posters that accompanied that campaign for Barbary removal and that campaign began in 1918 and it went on into the 1970s and if we just look at the first 15 years of that campaign in 15 years they ripped out over 18 million Barbary bushes and this was a huge success for disease prevention as it meant then that they didn't have that local source of spores present that could spread disease into the neighbouring wheat fields and so it really did help to dampen down the scale of disease outbreaks but here in the UK and in particular in England our farmers were even more proactive as they started ripping out these Barbary bushes over 300 years ago and you have to remember 300 years ago is before the work of Hendrik Antoine de Barry showing that the same fungus could infect the Barbary plants and the cereal crop and so these farmers were far ahead of the scientists of the time because they just knew that when they went out into the field they could see that their wheat crop was infected and if they had a Barbary bush next door that looked infected it was more likely the crop also would get infected so as Stackman says in this article well they just showed their good sense and they ripped out of these bushes but of course because here in the UK we actually used to have quite a big problem with wheat stem rust we used to have frequent epidemics of wheat stem rust but the last epidemic of this disease occurred now back in 1955 and because our farmers were so proactive we didn't have any legislation to restrict planting because our farmers were so good at pulling out these bushes and so that means of course the now that this this fungus is a distant memory for so many people here in the UK the number of these bushes has slowly started to increase over time but also now sadly this disease the situation has changed as back in 2013 we then saw wheat stem rust return to the UK when we recorded the first incidents of wheat stem rust in over 60 years and also in 2013 many of our colleagues across western Europe also reported wheat stem rust in their wheat fields and so that in some of these cases the infections were quite severe such as the outbreak in Sicily damaging tens of thousands of hectares of crops and many of our neighbouring countries in western Europe this was the first time that they'd seen the disease in their wheat fields for many many decades but here in the UK we were very very lucky because although we saw the disease in our fields in 2013 it was only one infected plant that was recorded so this isn't a really big problem for agriculture it is only one infected plant but it was rather significant because it was the first time that we'd seen wheat stem rust since that last epidemic back in 1955 but then over the next years of course the number of plants that were recorded as being infected slowly started to increase but up until 2021 the number of plants each year that were infected was just at one or two locations and just a small handful of plants but unfortunately that situation then changed this summer when we saw the most widespread outbreak of wheat stem rust here in the UK than we'd seen since 1955 the last epidemic of this wheat stem rust fungus and this is just an image of one of the fields that was infected and during 2022 we were able to show that there was infection across 12 different English counties and Wales and so really there were infections in many locations across the UK the situation had clearly changed since 2013 where we found just one infected plant we now had infections across 12 different English counties and Wales but luckily in all of these cases really the infections were quite limited again it was just a few plants up to the scale of a plot that was infected by wheat stem rust and also through discussions with colleagues it's clear that where people were using fungicide so chemical applications to dampen down disease from other pathogens then this was very effective at keeping the wheat stem rust in check and any any weak plants that were treated by fungicides didn't get infected it was only those that hadn't been treated that were infected but with the number of plants slowly increasing that are infected by wheat stem rust over the past few years of course the question then comes well what would happen if wheat stem rust did get re-established here in the UK would this actually be a big problem for agriculture and so to address that we then decided to work with Willem Bossoff at the University of the Free State in South Africa where he took many of the wheat varieties that our farmers grow and we have to remember that wheat here is not uniform we have lots of different types of wheat and so we took many of those types or varieties that we recommend that our farmers grow and we planted them out in South Africa where they get natural infection with wheat stem rust quite frequently and so then through these tests unfortunately what Willem Bossoff was able to show was that all of the wheat varieties that he planted out in the field got heavily infected by wheat stem rust and so this tells us that if wheat stem rust did become re-established in the UK then our wheat varieties are very vulnerable to infection but looking back at what our predecessors did to try to prevent wheat stem rust outbreaks back in 1955 where we had our last epidemic here in the UK it wasn't just inbuilt resilience within the plants that they relied upon they also used another strategy and this was to select for wheat varieties that matured a little bit earlier and so to explain this a bit more here in the UK we mostly plant a type of wheat that's called winter wheat and so this wheat is planted in around September October time and then over the season it gradually starts to grow and it remains green out there in the field until the end of June at the end of June it starts to dry out it gets its beautiful golden colour that we see out there in the wheat field and for our stem rust fungus it only really likes the tasty green tissue it only wants to eat these plants when they're nice and green and so these plants are only vulnerable during their green stage once they start drying out it's unlikely the fungus will really be able to take hold but also this stem rust fungus is a bit finicky it also only likes the summer months it is what we would call a warm temperature disease and so by planting earlier maturing wheat varieties such as the one shown here then this meant that the plants were only green out there in the field for really around a week or two until they started becoming golden and so they were really just at the edge of the stem rust danger zone where this wheat stem rust disease could really take hold but of course now with wheat stem rust being a distant memory our wheat plants are now starting to mature a bit later and we're selecting for ones that mature that little bit later and so for instance now this is a much more typical picture of our wheat wheat plants that we grow here in the UK and they're maturing just a few weeks later which is placing them green into that wheat stem rust danger zone but another factor that's also undermining the protection once afforded to early maturing wheat varieties is also due to changes in agricultural practices in light of climate instability created by climate change and so to explain this a little bit further this is a field that is very reminiscent of fields that farmers were faced with at the end of 2019 and so at the end of 2019 that autumn was particularly wet it was one of the wettest autums on record and so when a farmer is faced with this picture and they're thinking well I need to plant my winter wheat crop in September October well they of course can't get out into their fields they can't even get the tractors out there let alone thinking about the fact that they would have to plant them in soggy soil I mean these seeds are not going to be terribly happy and so when a farmer is faced with this kind of dilemma what do they do well another option they have to hand is that they can actually change what they're planting instead of planting the winter wheat that they would have to plant in these kind of wet conditions they can wait until this deluge of rain has passed and instead they can plant a different type of wheat that's planted in the spring time and we call that spring wheat and that's exactly what farmers did that year and so if we look at data that's taken here from Ireland which also experienced very similar conditions you can see that the farmers planted over 40% less winter wheat and over 200% more spring wheat in that year but this comes with a potential issue and that's that these spring wheat plants tend to mature a bit later and so we plant them after the last frost and then of course they take longer to develop so that then pushes them green into the wheat stem rust danger zone and so as we go to the future of course it's likely that we're going to see more problems with climate instability and these kind of wet autums are going to become more common and so we have to then keep in mind that any increase in spring planting could also then have a knock on effect on increasing outbreaks of diseases such as wheat stem rust and so are we actually creating a perfect storm for wheat stem rust to resurge here in the UK well as we look forward we know that many of the measures that were in place back in the 1950s and that have prevented wheat stem rust epidemic since that period are slowly getting eroded we know that Barbary has increased in prevalence just naturally because we haven't had a problem with this disease but of course that then can act as a source of spores and seed outbreaks of this disease we know that within our wheat varieties they're very vulnerable to infection and we're also now eroding that early maturity that used to protect them from wheat stem rust outbreaks but luckily we do have our modern fungicides and they're currently very effective at providing a really good level of control against wheat stem rust but of course relying so heavily on chemicals and chemical application is really not a sustainable strategy and so it's clear that wrestling wheat stem rust back into check is going to take an entire community and at the centre of this all of the lessons that we've learned throughout history to help ensure that we don't see the kind of scale of epidemics that we're all too frequent here in the past so once a disease such as wheat stem rust starts to encroach on our crops it's also important that we have really good detection mechanisms in place for rapid detection and we know that all three of our wheat rust um fungi are serial killers they're they're notorious for their ability to rapidly spread between wheat plants through the production of vast quantities of these ball spore like structures which they use then to spread on the wind and move from one white plant to the next to the next and spread the disease throughout an entire field they can also catch wind currents and travel even further even between continents and so this is a really effective mechanism for spreading disease around but also we have to keep in mind that these wheat rust serial killers don't come as a uniform form they also have many different types or biological forms which we call strains and so here we have an example of a new of a strain that's blown into this area that's represented by these yellow type spores here and then we have two wheat varieties wheat variety a and wheat variety b and you can see that wheat variety a is very diseased it's very much infected by this particular strain whereas wheat variety b stays resistant it has some resilience against this particular strain of this serial killer and yet now imagine a situation where a new strain moves into this region represented by these orange spores and now this new strain has the ability to infect both wheat variety a and wheat variety b and so you can see that it's not just important that we have a mechanism in place to detect which fungus we have out there in the field but we also need a mechanism that works at a resolution that allows us to determine the precise strain that's out there because that's what the farmers need to know they need to know exactly which wheat varieties are under threat and so to illustrate the sheer devastation that can be caused by a new strain moving into a country we can take an example from Ethiopia which is a country where my team also work and if we go back to 2010 Ethiopia in east Africa suffered the worst wheat yellow rust outbreak in recent history this outbreak affected um sorry was due to a new strain moving into the country and it then affected over 600 hectares of crop this is over a third of the country's wheat production area it's thought the losses totaled over 250 million us dollars or over 15 percent of total national production and so you can see that this was a catastrophic kind of level epidemic here but it also brought to the forefront the importance of disease prevention and also really good disease detection and through that some subsequent work they then started to build a network working with many international partners and created a wheat rust early warning system to protect them from this kind of scale of epidemics in the future and it's within that framework that my lab work trying to see how we can integrate strain level diagnostics into this system and so how do we rapidly identify new strains well here i'd like to firstly introduce you to a colleague of mine Dave Hodson who works at the international maize and wheat improvement center and is very much a partner in the project i'm going to describe but i'd also like to introduce you to somebody else a fictional british detective known as miss marple who is the namesake for the methodology that i'm going to describe and so the method that Dave and my team have been developing is called a marple diagnostics it stands for mobile and real-time plant disease diagnostics and it's a method for diagnosing individual strains of our wheat rust serial killers out there in the field and we can carry out this method pretty much anywhere as you can see working in the back of a car it also uses the latest portable handheld sequencing device shown here a min iron sequencer that's the size of your mobile phone and it's truly a game changing strategy that we've managed to develop that has wide reaching implications for how wheat rusts are diagnosed and will be tracked into the future and so just to describe how this method works in a bit more detail firstly we go out we find an infected plant in the field and then we take a piece of that plant and we then work on that piece of plant and we do some mobile sequencing with that handheld portable sequencing device and this allows us to look at the genetic code of our fungus the building blocks of this fungus that give it its form and function and that genetic code is very slightly different between individual strains of the fungus so we can decipher those differences through some magical data analysis and that allows us to then know exactly which strain we have of the fungus in that sample and what's really neat about this method is that you can go from getting the sample in the field to knowing which strain you have in just two days and if we compare that to previous methods previous methods to many many months now we can do all of this in just two days and get that data in near real time and integrate it into the wheat rust early warning system in Ethiopia but also through the creation of this system we made sure that we also created a mobile lab system where all of the components needed to conduct marble diagnostics are contained within a single hard case you don't need access to a kind of sophisticated laboratory you really can do this anywhere and so this creates a truly mobile and rapid response laboratory and the fact that you can carry out marble diagnostics pretty much anywhere also means that the samples don't need to be sent overseas they remain with the people in country and the ownership of the data analysis also remains with those people on location and so marble diagnostics is a pioneering step in wheat rust management and we're really excited right now because it's currently being integrated into lots of different surveillance systems in many locations around the globe so now moving on to the final pillar of disease management which is looking at how we respond to diseases such as the wheat rusts once they've started to become established well just like with other plant health threats we rely on an integrated approach to disease management and we also start with of course the agronomic practices such as plant hygiene making sure we don't take an infected plant and move it to another location so having really good practices around plant hygiene and then of course also making sure that we do things like remove Barbary which can be a source of infection and then next we also have of course our modern fungicides which are very effective in controlling many diseases but as I mentioned earlier on their own they're not a sustainable strategy and this is because they contain chemicals that can also potentially be quite damaging for the environment and so we have to keep in mind that there are a lot of targets around the world to try to reduce the use of these modern fungicides and they're also quite expensive and so for instance within the European Union we have the farm to fork strategy which aims to reduce pesticide use and risk by 30% by 2030 and so as I mentioned modern fungicides are not a sustainable strategy on their own but then finally we have resistance breeding and to appreciate and I just like to finish on the resistance breeding part for the last part of my lecture so to appreciate this the impact of scientific discovery we can on that has had an impact on resistance breeding we can turn back to the beginning of the last century with the phenomenal work of Sir Roland Biffin who was the one of the first scientists to introduce genetic theory within resistance breeding and so what Sir Roland Biffin noticed was that some wheat varieties inherit a constitution that makes them capable of withstanding attacks of certain fungi whereas other wheat varieties don't have those constitutions and so he used this genetic theory to then add this to his breeding programmes and then he went on and created many different wheat varieties for instance creating Little Joss the first wheat variety that he then released and to create Little Joss he took a wheat variety that had really good resilience against wheat yellow rust and a wheat variety that had high yield he crossed them together and then he selected offspring that contained both of these characteristics and there he saw Little Joss and so Little Joss was then released in the 1910s and it was then used by farmers for over 40 years and of course then Roland went on and he released other wheat varieties and had a great impact on agriculture here in the UK and that's why the farmers were so grateful they also hailed him as the wheat wizard if we then go on around half a century further forward we then have the pioneering work of Norman Borlog who moved to Mexico in the 1940s and then he went on to create high yielding and rust resistant wheat varieties and also to introduce new agricultural practices initially within Mexico helping Mexico to go from a importer to an exporter of wheat massively improving wheat production in that region but then he started to advocate for these varieties and also these new practices all around the world in many different countries and that paved the way to the development of what we call the green revolution and the introduction of these new practices into so many of these regions around the world actually saved millions of people from ultimately starvation and so Norman Borlog was then awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to global food security but also during the period when Norman Borlog was working out there in the Mexican wheat fields this was also the period where we saw the structure of DNA being resolved with of course the critical contributions of Roslyn Franklin and then that of course went on to allow us to develop DNA markers which allowed us to look at the genetic code of our of RM wheat plants and to track those constitutions that Sir Roland Biffin had identified now we could track them as we knew they were in the DNA and we could track them in the offspring in a genetic cross and so then of course at the beginning of this century we also have the genomics era being born and then subsequently the wheat genome being released and this gives us access to the entire genetic code of the wheat plant and so we can see all of the form and function coded within that genetic code and of course all of the extensive resources needed to have access to that code and then just last year we also saw precision genome editing coming to the forefront in the UK for weeks when we had the first week trials approved and precision genome editing has phenomenal potential in the context of rust resistance breeding it would allow us for instance to take the constitutions that Roland Biffin identified and to put them in a new wheat variety move them between wheat varieties stack them in new wheat varieties adding multiple of these constitutions into a new wheat variety in a very precise way but it also allows us to make very small edits within the wheat genome and that can also help to enhance resistance against these wheat rust serial killers and so to illustrate the potential of genome editing in that kind of context firstly here is a standard wheat plant this particular wheat plant is very susceptible to our serial killer our wheat rust and at the bottom here we have for instance infection with wheat yellow rust on this particular leaf and when the fungus infects this plant what it's doing is it's trying to get all of its nutrients that the fungus needs from that plant it can't live without the plant the plant provides everything that it needs to survive and to prosper but also at the same time the plant doesn't like being attacked and so the fungus needs to also turn off all the mechanisms that the plant would use to fight it back and so if you can see that if we were to identify those elements that the fungus really needs from this plant and we were able to delete those elements well that then could make a plant completely resistant to infection because those elements that the fungus absolutely needs to survive wouldn't be present in that plant and so at the bottom here we have a proof of concept where we've edited just one gene of the more than 100 000 genes in the wheat genome and you can see that it's gone in this proof of concept from susceptible to being resistant and so I think this really nicely illustrates the huge potential that genome editing has in improving resistance to our in our wheat crops to these deadly serial killers so as we look to the future I think we've never been closer to realising our goal of defeating these serial killers we have all those lessons of the past that we can use to create really good preventative measures for instance as you saw in the case of wheat stem rust we also have these phenomenal technological advances in disease diagnostics that could potentially help us to now get one step ahead of these serial killers and finally the new emerging scientific advances that are fast tracking these resistance breeding but to achieve this goal is going to take a diversification in scientific thinking to take full advantage of all of these scientific discoveries is going to make sure mean that we're going to have to diversify our thinking and this can only be achieved by continuing to promote diversification in the leadership among our beloved wheat field and this is precisely what the Roslyn Franklin or Lord will allow us to achieve through the creation of the Roslyn Franklin women and wheat champions program which is a career development program that has many many components but it also contains right through from one to one mentoring to leadership training to ensure that our fantastically talented early career female researchers are supported at that transition period to independence whilst also this program will help us to accelerate ourselves along our journey to achieving gender parity in wheat research because I think it's only once we truly embrace both these new technological advances and a diversity in scientific thinking that as scientists we're going to finally succeed in outsmarting these serial killers and make our wheat production system more resilient for future generations to come and so then I'd just like to finish by of course acknowledging everybody that's been involved in the work that I briefly touched on today right through from our supernatural plant pathologists through to our modern day plant pathologists that work in my team and all of our collaborators around the world and of course all of the people that have been helping with our wheat career development program and the fantastic mentees that we have in that program are funders and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you for that amazing talk and that engaging way you did it. It was wonderful. So now we're going on to the question and answer session of this afternoon's program. Come over here. We have two roaming monks who will go round and take questions from the floor and also to remind those who are here online that if you go to slido.com and enter the code R2211 Rosalind, R2211 22nd November, you can send some talks in. So thank you and actually we already have a couple of questions from the online audience so if we start with those while people in the audience are thinking. From Kate, is there one thing you would like to see the crop farmers take on? What is the one thing you think crop farmers could do? I think that's a really tough question. It's real sad to you expect that one. So I think there's plenty that the farmers can do. I think one of the things that we need to do is have really good conversation and I think also when we've been talking about wheat stemrus, we learned so much in the past that I think maybe has got a bit forgotten because it's a disease that kind of disappeared for a while and so I think it's really important that we actually have good kind of engagement and discussion around these things and what we can learn from these lessons of history and actually apply today that could help to protect our crops. Is there a good relationship between say wheat farmers in East Anglia and the scientists out there? I think we do have good discussion but I think we can always improve this and I think that's definitely something that I would love to see improved even further. There's a take up of this. Jess wondered, I guess thank you so much of this, is there a way to vaccinate wheat against wheat germ? I mean when we think about you do the analysis analogous, humans get disease and plants do too. I think what we do with wheat plants is we either treat them with chemicals to try to dampen down disease or prevent disease from occurring and we can also then introduce what we call resistance into these plants so we can give them some resilience against infection and that's kind of what we have in our hands that we can use to try to protect them against the wheat rusts. We mentioned this earlier but the resistance or genetic engineering of plants it seems an obvious thing if you were mentioning it that. I think it's really important that we think about how we can also integrate some of these new technologies in that sphere because some of these new technologies are super exciting and they could massively accelerate our ability to kind of speed up the response process because you can see that new strains can appear so quickly and with these new technologies we have the chance now to really accelerate the process of getting these new resistances into crops. And so what do you plant plant scientists? What do you need to do to influence policy and public response to this because you presented us today with a lecture that says this is dangerous and this is really important. I think it's about those conversations and making sure that we have really good open conversations about these topics and talking with lots of different people lots of different stakeholders and making sure that those things are always discussed openly. Are there any questions from the audience? There's one here please. We have to excuse us if we have microphones because even if you have a loud voice our online audience won't hear otherwise. Is there any research directing against the rust and looking in to see maybe there's just too many species? I don't know. It seems to be there's no mention of going down that path. So there's a lot of research looking at how they infect and trying to understand those processes better because that can also help to develop more targeted for instance fungicides so you could identify better targets for fungicides that were more specific if you would have a better understanding of how they develop. So I think there's a lot of research on that area kind of developmental biology and so on and for fungal organisms. There was a lady back white. Thank you. Hello Diane thank you so much for your talk. I was just wondering what caused the outburst of Stem Rost 60 years ago? What happened in UK that came back here and the other one is the secondary host it's just for Stem Rost or it's for all the three of them. So the first part of the question was looking at why we Stem Rost disappeared and then came back and I think we had really good measures in place to try to keep it in check such as the kind of early maturing wheat varieties. We've had now the modern fungicides being developed so there's a lot to try to keep it in check. The reason that it's starting to potentially come back is because we're now forgetting about those things and we're starting to then slip back and to for instance now grow these later maturing varieties and we're also seeing a lot of these fungi starting to adapt more and so there's a lot of possibilities for it to re-emerge. I think the fact that we saw a big outbreak this year was more due to some of the climate conditions that kind of coincided and made a really good situation for wheat Stem Rost to take on and take over here and to bring in all of the spores that were needed to kind of spread it across the whole of the country as well due to some of the wind movement earlier in the year and so for the Barbary as well the other question about Barbary. So Barbary can also act as a an alternate host as we call it so another host for the wheat Yellow Rust fungus too but it can't do that here so as I mentioned these wheat rust these serial killers are quite finicky so the Yellow Rust doesn't use its other other plant here in the UK it only uses it in what we would call the near Himalaya region so it can't be found on Barbary here or anywhere in Europe but Wheat Stem Rust does use then Barbary in lots of different species of Barbary although common Barbary is the one that we tend to focus on as it's very infected by Wheat Stem Rust. So does that answer all your questions? Thank you. I have another one from the floor and then I'll go back to the online ones. Thank you for a really interesting lecture. So you talked about the effect of climate change and how that impacts how and when crops are planted but you also talked about this danger zone for the wheat rust. I'm just wondering could climate change also affect when that happens, we were bringing it earlier and that might affect how the wider picture as well. Yeah I think that's a really important point that climate change is going to have kind of different effects on our on our wheat crops and how we grow them and that danger zone could indeed move a bit earlier and if the temperatures get warmer a bit earlier but also with this particular fungus again they are finicky so it also likes damp conditions and this summer we had actually before the drought kicked in we actually had some really warm times where we had damp in the evenings and that really helped to start the stem rust to take off and so again if it was just to be very dry and warm earlier in the season then that wouldn't necessarily be suitable for wheat stem rust it would have to have those kind of damp night times too so yeah but yeah climate change is going to have a big impact on the way that we see these diseases popping up. Another way we manage things so for instance I remember do you remember everybody used to burn the fields burn the stubble and we all now hate burning the stubble that we don't do it anymore but now was that a preventative strategy which we've now taken away from farmers that they can't do anymore? I think the problem is that diseases can live out there on the wheat stubble when it's left behind in the field so it's good to turn over and to try to and like get rid of the stubble within the field because it can just work as kind of a little sauce that sits out there and then spreads the disease in the next season. Harry says what do you think is the future of wheat will we have more or less as we move forward I mean thinking about the questions you've been addressing on climate change and I hadn't really realised this is naivety just how ubiquitous wheat was I was kind of thinking well corn and cassava and things were far more important and rice. So I think you can never really predict how we're going to go with different crops it might be that we see other crops being grown more but it's thought that actually I mean I was looking at a particular study where they were showing that many of these crops we might actually enhance some of the productivity but then the diseases might start to get worse too so it's like trying to balance these things at the same time and the influence of climate change is on on both aspects. Yeah and and and and sort of Mike asked a question a bit about more about the future asking you to be a futurologist to how is diversify the wheat strains we grow going to be really important as we move forward. So I think so for me when I think about wheat stemorus for instance this is a disease that even in history you didn't see an epidemic necessarily every single year you saw it every few years so having a strategy that just deals with wheat stemorus wouldn't necessarily be the right strategy so actually having different wheat varieties and thinking about having you know ones that maybe mature in different times and so on this is a really good strategy to try to keep diseases under control so maybe it is is right that maybe trying to diversify a bit more on what we're planting would be a good idea. Thank you. There's other question one at the front here and then there's one at the back there. This was a homegrown question I think from John Innes. It is a John Innes question I confessed to being a very proud colleague of Diane's. Diane is I'm currently trying to pull together all the big farmers from Norfolk and Suffolk next June to come and talk and listen to you and others about the work you're doing but I've been fascinated by the reaction I've got from some people it reminds me of when I was chairing a London hospital during Covid how difficult it was to get our staff to realise that their lives were a risk and I've actually had one of the biggest farmers in East Anglia saying I won't come because I don't want to have anything to do with genetic editing. Are you surprised by that? I think there's a lot more that also we do so there's a lot more discussions to be had but yeah I think it's also about having those conversations isn't it and having those open discussions and maybe not having that opportunity would be a real shame and that we wouldn't be able to discuss what that really means because it's important that we work with people and discuss these things openly and educate people on what actually these terminologies mean and the possibilities and the opportunities that are out there utilising genetic and like genome editing for instance. You mentioned the outbreak here in 2010 and the outbreak in Ethiopia in your lecture can you give us an idea of what kind of price changes follow those sort of outbreaks and then what impact that has on the food supply and global hunger? Yeah so it depends where these things occur so I think it's difficult to say exactly a price impact when you're talking about like East Africa but in the UK you do see that wheat prices you know are modulated depending on how much availability there is and of course if we have large outbreaks then of course that can impact wheat prices like we're seeing currently with for instance the war in Ukraine I mean you know this is impacting wheat prices so you know any large disease outbreak will impact those things and then of course the bread that you go out to buy once a week. Thank you this one there. Thank you very much for that talk and I wanted to ask do you know of any empirical evidence to justify the social resistance to GMO like sources like GMO food and GMO things in our diet? So I think these are maybe a slightly different discussion than more with the genome editing which is a very precise technology and then the GMO approaches so I think these are all very different things but you know I mean maybe I didn't quite understand the question. Just is there do we actually have any solid evidence to suggest that in particular genome editing would negatively affect food sources? No, no. I think it's a bit the question that we were asking for I mean how and maybe it's a general question of sciences and how scientists communicate. I think it is about communication and I think I think we can always do a better job of scientists communicating what we actually mean when we're utilising these new techniques because sometimes I mean you know genome editing is quite fancy terminology but actually it's very simple what we want to do and what we want to achieve and why are we trying to do these things and I think maybe we need to communicate better with people how these technologies work and what actually this means in reality. I'd like to suggest you go and talk to our current king because he was one of the leaders about that and so there. There was one more question from the room but there's also got one more question here and we've got one minute so I'm going to ask this because I think it's quite an interesting question from Siobhan. She's saying how a biotechnology advance is supporting the work and I think in some ways I should comment on how advances in engineering technology and other kinds have been important in your work because I think that's definitely I mean you look at all the sequencing technologies and so on they've been you know moving ahead at such a fast pace that they're having a huge impact in many different aspects of our work through from having the wheat genome now available and many different wheat genomes available of different varieties right through to the actual physical technology that we're using for doing strain level diagnostics in East Africa and in South Asia these portable handheld sequencing devices blow my mind you know this is phenomenal advances that we're seeing in technology. I think we should never underestimate how important that is to drive fundamental science forward. I'm really sorry I apologise to those who haven't got your question online and to those in the audience I haven't got to answer the question but there is one important thing that we have to do here tonight. It is my honour and great pleasure to formally congratulate you and give you this award from a wonderful woman scientist who did a lot for women in science to another wonderful woman scientist who is doing great science and also supporting other women in your science career. Thank you. I'm sure that you'll agree with me that this is an example of a scientist doing brilliant work but also who could communicate well and it's a lesson to all of us that we're not just through great science but we also have to communicate it well so one last congratulation thank you all for coming and I'm sure that Diane will be up here for a few minutes prepared to answer some of those burning questions. Thank you all for coming tonight.