World leading scientists invite us all to celebrate the wonder of plants at family fun day

Visitors will have the chance to take part in a range of fun experiments ranging from extracting DNA from raspberries to using gel and electricity to separate biological molecules, and will have a chance to learn about techniques we are using to develop crops that are more robust and resilient to climate change, pest and disease.

One of the scientists who will be there is Dr. Gabriela Toledo-Ortiz from The James Hutton Institute who is planning on holding a series of games aimed at identifying the origin of some of the common crops in our diets which hopefully hold the secret to more robust crops in the future. She explains more: “A large number of plants and animals moved between Europe and the Americas following the voyages of people like Christopher Columbus and although this all happened several hundred years ago, these exchanges have shaped the crops that we produce and eat now.

“As a result of the challenges now posed by climate change on global agriculture, we can expect a new ‘wave’ of exchanges as we now need to look to those countries where these crops originated from and re-evaluate whether ancestral varieties have traits that can be used to increase resilience of modern crops. One of the games we will be running this Saturday is to identify the origin of common crops and in particular, what do our ancestral tomatoes look like and where do they grow? I can promise you, some of them are quite different to what we find in the shops now.”