Name: What if the best fertilizer was an algorithm? | Laxmi Parida | TED Institute
Uploaded: 2020-03-22T19:01:04.000Z
Duration: 10 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm a weakened chef, and when I travel, visiting the local food market is always on the top of my list.

When I'm in Beijing, I must check out the leeches in the Dong Woman night Market when in Seattle, the moral mushrooms in the Pike Market and when in Palermo, the Kyoto beats in the Balata.

Food is amongst the most photographed subjects on the Internet, and there are four billion recipes floating around, and at the end of this, I will do we get one more.

I realize I'm very fortunate to have access to this plenty and variety that lets me even play with food.

But food is not an entertaining amusement.

When I'm hungry, I'm a crappy mother, a snappy daughter and ambition scientist.

I'm not myself when I'm hungry, even momentarily.

Yet I'm painfully aware that many around the world struggled to meet the daily basic caloric newts.

15% of the world goes hungry every day, and a lot of them systematically and three million Children die every year out of insufficient food and two billion in a downward spiral off malnutrition.

Our population is growing by a factor of seven, and the current seven billion is projected to be 10 by 2050.

And in the last century alone we lost 75% of genetic diversity in our essential food crops.

And in my lifetime alone, the biodiversity in the tropics has declined by 60%.

Today, most of the calories of the world's population comes from 12 plant species, a corn right sorghum and such and a few animal species.

So the worry about safe and sustained food supply to feed the current and future planet Israel.

But there is a danger even more immediate.

For instance, earlier this year in Bangladesh, the wheat crop was attacked by a fungal infection, threatening to wipe it out from the entire subcontinent.

And avocado, a divine delight of a fruit is under threat from a fungal infection.

And I cannot imagine a world without chocolate.

And did you know that chocolate grows on trees, which is broom Ah, fungal infection slash production off a cow by 80% in Brazil a few decades ago.

So these incursions not just in danger our favorite food crops, but also pushed small farmers out of the farmland into city shanty towns.

A scourge in one corner rapidly spreads to the others, and the plunging biodiversity puts at risk the food supply not just a vulnerable countries, but also those that are rolling and plenty.

We have unhappy with chemicals, whether in fertilizers or pesticides.

We had even more wary of Guillermo's or genetically modified organisms.

Although there is no scientific evidence yet, we fear what unintended consequences Jim was may bring can get around this.

As you know, agriculture is an evolutionary master stroke of the last 10,000 years, and plants have been around for millions of years in nature continues to carry our experiments, and we see the results all around us.

She's talking to us through a variety and the array of flora.

My silver bullet is to ferret out and use this diversity that already exists within the DNA off the plant populations.

We don't have to manipulate the plants with exogenous or external elements, but we unlock the secrets that already exists within the plants.

An organic approach to an organic problem.

Unfortunately, we're in the throws off a genomic revolution.

The cost of D N A sequencing has come down a 1,000,000 full.

Its power has gone up 1000 4 What does this entail?

Life in it can be and is being sequenced.

But we must make sense off this delusion.

The usual suspects like mushy learning any.

People often ask me, How complex can the genome off a simple Plan B and I say very complex, more complex than that of us humans, for instance, we have two copies off a chromosome.

In my earlier life, I worked with continuous mathematics, the kind of deals with public all surfaces such as aircraft wings.

But then I had a chance encounter with the genome.

Did you know, with its long strand of just four letter Steve C.

G is a really Wonka chocolate factory Off posits the questions we ask off this discreet, not been generous, discreet CCD abstraction of DNA.

It's like solving complex puzzles, so I don't do discreet Mad, which is a grown a Persian off puzzle solving.

So I'll use the metaphor off a sudoku puzzle because I believe many off you are already familiar with it to solve a Nim Porton problem off untangling the chromosomes off multiple copies of nearly identical ones.

The nearly identical copies mash up the chromosome, but for a bag of cryptic ALS, why the puzzle?

Sudoku, like most puzzles, has it set off fix rooms, but so does my problem with its immutable constraint.

Furthermore, I can show his bag of clues into an instance of sudoku and piggyback right on the solution.

But the Sudoku has indigenous, but these are only placeholders.

I simply replaced them with the letters, and I have simultaneously untangled the chromosomes off a population off the speeches.

But, you know, it was only a metaphor for the problem.

In real life, the sizes are bigger, the dimensions are higher.

The number and complexity of the constraints are higher and there are many more such maddeningly hard problems.

But it is this mosaic off problem solvers of algorithms that crack open the door off our understanding off the relation between the interior, which we cannot see the DNA with the exterior, which we can see like the color of a part or even stress resistance.

Be ground up the plant material, extracted its DNA, admit sons off it through a suite off puzzle solvers.

Open the door for breeding farms, resistance and good, if not better tasting crop.

But this puzzle solver, so agnostic to the species or to the characteristics what works for Carl, what's for avocado, potato?

Or even grasp the progenitor off all domesticated greats?

It's fascinating to me that we can connect the dots from diversity toe action through the double helix Dina, big data and mathematics works.

We hope that in the coming years, with mathematics as our new fertilizer, if you will will preserve diversity will have robust crops, will have better crops.

Reducing the stress on the environment will have sustainable agriculture happy small farmers and better and more food for all.

So no parent has to ever worry about how to feed her Children.

And now, from a mom who has worked with the DNA off skirts, ravage crops like a car and avocado, Here's a recipe that I promised you earlier.

Take 100 gram bar off the favorite dark chocolate, melted and fall in the pulp off two avocados and Paula full of antioxidants, unsaturated fats and even delicious three, please.