nm0187: so on the handout you've got this and i don't i'm not going to go 
through every lecture and and start talking about it but you have got this and 
hopefully you'll see this develops come along so we'll cover the the general 
introduction this week and then there's the main types of breeding schemes er 
and then some more of the of the techniques and backgrounds er and ending up 
with the releasing of varieties and all the things that go with that about 
patenting plant breeders' rights and a little bit about the ethics er 
particularly of course the G-M-Os and this sort of thing okay so hopefully that 
sort of structure will make sense as we as we go along the the other side of 
your sheet is trash you can pretty well ignore it's about the er the posters 
and i've changed it slightly and i'll give you another sheet er just now but 
but basically you've got from this week after the lecture i'll give you a a a 
list and some information to pick a topic and you each pick one topic you'll 
do your poster and your essay on that one topic you'll then prepare it during 
the time including using er the computers over in P-S-L to to produce the first 
draft and then in weeks eight and nine you'll present the posters before we'll 
ask you questions about and et cetera and hopefully learn from them er and then 
week ten if there's anything to pick up we can do okay yeah 
sm0188: er so we give in the posters in week seven er 
nm0187: er yeah you'll need to give us the er the posters i'll explain on a 
disk in week seven so that we can get it er in a state that you can present it 
on the on the next week er and then the er the essays need to come in in week 
eight on the same subject area i'll go through it a bit more er just now okay 
we'll come back to that okay so that's the main outline of things what i want 
to do is to start off by giving you some of the general introduction to plant 
breeding itself okay now if you do have questions then please do feel free to 
ask them as we go along and i will try and remember 
at the end of each lecture if i don't shout at me to please ask whatever 
questions you want to okay but otherwise just ask as we go along okay as i said 
i'm not sure if you were all here when i said what i'll try and do is to try 
and give you handouts of all the overheads so er so you shouldn't have to 
scribble them down too much but er you may want to add more information in 
various ways oh the other important thing to tell you despite what it says on 
your timetable next week the lecture is also here because they haven't finished 
the building [laugh] okay so so next week turn up here again [hum] [hum] okay 
what i'd like to s-, start by doing and i hope you don't regard this as too 
trivial is just to put plants in context a little bit as i s-, as i see them 
certainly as far as humans are concerned what you have to remember is that we 
are completely dependent on plants okay we're not completely dependent on 
animals we are completely dependent on plants we either eat them or eat the 
thing that ate them 
okay so whatever happens and whenever we're talking about even growing crops or 
whatever er or whether we're growing ornamental plants we are completely 
dependent on them in one one sense or another they are the only route or 
basically the only route that we can go from the inorganics C-O-two et cetera 
to the organic and use the products okay so they're extremely important in 
their own right never mind what we're going to do or how we're going to exploit 
them and food is not the only product we get from from plants i tend to to talk 
quite a bit about food crops but that's not because they're the only ones it's 
just it's it's slightly easier to talk about and they're ones i'm more familiar 
with but of course there are all the ornamentals for a start which are 
important certainly commercially important but there are also a whole range of 
other things that we get from plants drugs for instance clothing paper rubber 
dyes all these sort of products are come from 
plants and are ones which can be subject of course to plant breeding to crop 
improvement et cetera so they're essential element to sustaining human life and 
although other organisms has various roles they really are s-, central er to 
what we're doing and for our survival so it's important when we go on to talk 
about cropping you do realize that central role and as i say a lot of the time 
we may be talking about quite narrow things but you need to bear in mind the 
broader context in which plants are are there and the ways that we're going to 
be exploiting them or could exploit them okay so having said that you'll not be 
surprised if when we ask the question how long has plant breeding been going on 
the answer is as long as we've been practising settled agriculture of any shape 
or form okay [cough] so for instance if a farmer went out and collected seed 
grew them and they did relatively well the chances are he'd go back to the same 
place to collect seed or use the seed he'd grown okay 
if a neighbour had a crop that was growing particularly well you'd not be 
surprised if his neighbours had a-, acquired seed or were given it by him in 
one way or another they would get it and particular types would therefore tend 
to be er multiplied and so by this picking of the best then you'd start to get 
qu-, fairly quickly at least over a reasonable times types that were different 
from the wild er ones growing around them in other words you'd start to get 
domesticated forms which were different from the general population of of the 
wild plants around and these would then start to form almost exclusively the 
basis for the p-, plants the crops that were cultivated they would only use 
those because they wouldn't get such a good yield or they wouldn't get the 
right sort of er product from them from the the wild ones so they'd grow these 
so certainly before Mendel's experiments were reported most of the crop plants 
had been domesticated so most of the crops as we 
recognize them today okay they may look s-, different to some extent but you'd 
recognize them as crop were all carried out before we had any knowledge 
whatsoever of genetics so this was basically a lot of it carried out by people 
who were simply growing producing things and knowing what they wanted to to 
grow and produce so i talk about plant breeding as a science and we do put 
science into it but you do have to remember that a lot of what was achieved was 
before we even recognized this so i mean that is is the case and i'm not er in 
any way belittling their contribution it's very very big and they did it 
without the sort of knowledge that mostly we're going to talk about so it kind 
of puts us in context a bit [cough] okay so moving on from there to ask really 
the next general question you might ask what would be the objectives of the 
crop breeder [cough] well in many ways they're still the same objectives in 
broad terms that were originally the driving force and a major one is 
increasing 
productivity certainly in most of the crop plants that is still a major 
consideration the desire and need to produce more per unit area is really just 
as it's always been in Europe we do get and in a number of the other developed 
countries we do get surpluses of some crops and we do get quite a lot of 
discussion about whether this means we should not produce cultivars or types 
that are more highly productive et cetera but if you think about it there's 
really no industry no i-, system by which increased efficiency and productivity 
is not sensible you'd be better to go for increased productivity but growing a 
smaller area than you would the other way around profitability et cetera is 
still an important consideration but i'm not suggesting that should be the only 
one i'm not suggesting that we should ignore things like the environmental 
impact that we're having this is something else that we have to consider but if 
we're talking for instance about low input 
production then we do need to have cultivars which are suited to that there's 
no point thinking you can just take any cultivar and put it in a low input 
system you got to look for ones that grow well for instance without high 
nitrogen inputs that possibly do grow quite well competitively with weeds that 
are resistant to many of the pests and diseases if you're not going to control 
these by chemical means okay so the need for the increase in production is 
still there and is still a major driving force the other thing which you need 
to bear in mind this is that much of the world this is not the case they do not 
have an over-production that's absolutely sure and you can talk about the total 
world production and if you spread it out what would happen but that's not 
reality most of the food crops have to be grown locally to be used effectively 
so many countries there's still a very real need to feed the people that are 
there and if you look at the projections for the world population you can see 
this is not something that's going to go away very quickly or very easily 
so one of the objectives of plant breeding is really to produce lines cultivars 
or varieties and i use those terms interchangeably that are er better adapted 
to the particular environmental conditions under which they're expected to grow 
okay so there's not a universal type of cultivar it's got to be cultivars that 
are suited to the particular conditions under which they're going to grow now 
these might be climatic conditions which clearly vary quite dramatically around 
the world they might be er different day lengths they might be different 
temperatures and just as easily they might be different farming practices 
different husbandry techniques these are the sort of considerations that you 
need when you're thinking about what they're going to be adapted to so one of 
the questions that arises what do i really mean by better adapted er and mostly 
in plant breeding terms 
this has tended previously to simply mean whether they produce more crude yield 
whether you get more tatties on the bottom of your plant whether you get more 
grains of wheat whether you get more tea leaves off the bushes et cetera but 
this has been modified recently to be much more sensible or at least i think 
it's more sensible first of all the main change has been much more towards 
usable yield rather than total yield so this is the amount that you can 
actually you get for the purpose that you're considering so the amount that you 
actually get to eat off it the amount you get processed from it the amount that 
you can actually use after storage these sorts of considerations so it starts 
bringing in important other factors like the nutritional er value of the 
product like the er ability to withstand storage diseases like the reduction in 
waste for example if you take potatoes if you peel them how much do you lose 
all these sorts of considerations now impose 
themselves on usable yield rather than simply crude yield okay the next 
consideration that has become much more recognized is the need for stability of 
yield now in countries like this mostly or quite a lot of this has been 
achieved by having inputs chemical inputs mostly by using fertilizers by using 
sprays so that is one way of stabilizing the the at least the gross yield on a 
year by year basis but the other way that's also been done is to look at the er 
plant breeding and the resistance to things like biotic and abiotic stresses to 
cut down the year to year variation i think it's fairly obvious particularly if 
you're depending on a crop if one year it yields a lot the next year it yields 
a lot and the one after not very much at all the average of those three years 
might look all right and you might say that's quite a good variety but in 
realistic terms if you haven't got anything to eat in the third year is is kind 
of a bit tricky okay so although it 
seems obvious it's not something that's been too highly er stressed before so 
as i say one of the ways round this is to look very much at things like disease 
resistance and tolerance to abiotic stresses temperature er drought water-
logging any of these types of things the next thing that as i say has been 
having increasing emphasis is the quality of the product clearly one of the 
important parts in a food crop is the nutritional quality itself but also 
aspects like taste i'm sure you've all heard the stories of how the new 
varieties do not taste anything like the old ones and we've got rid of all the 
good qualities of these and to some extent it's it's true er but it's certainly 
something that is much more er focused on now there's also things like the 
calorific value er co-, protein content fat level vitamin concentration all 
these things are aspects that do vary between different genotypes and you can 
select for within the within the crop [cough] then there's the 
environmental impact which we've touched on before agriculture when it's 
practised has raised quite a considerable debate in in quite a number of ways 
and in most developed countries we do the work for intensive agricultural 
production there is very little in this country which you could call a natural 
environment it depends er to a despite people protesting about er the effects 
on the countryside the countryside is almost completely agricultural production 
it's certainly framed and a product of agricultural production so we do have to 
to bear this in mind when you look at other countries and you talk about them 
not destroying their rainforests and all the rest of it which i fully 
sympathize with you have to remember that's exactly what we have done we have 
taken out all our forests and put in agriculture but it's something that er er 
say we need to to think carefully about we need to think about inputs such as 
do we need high fertilizer levels do we need 
chemicals et cetera one of the answers is undoubtedly from plant breeding if we 
can produce yield without such a high level of fertilizer if we can stabilize 
yield without having to spray pesticides then clearly that is something we 
should or we could go for and to a certain extent it is being done again you 
have to look at it in the context that you expect the thing to be grown if it's 
going to be grown in a high input system then you will have cultivars that will 
respond and grow in that situation if you're looking at low input then it must 
be in that if you're looking in a developing country you have to look at what 
condition and husbandry practices they're going to do and what effect that's 
going to have as i said one of the primary aims is to produce varieties which 
are better adapted but the second part of that is to the particular 
environmental conditions under which they're expected to grow to produce 
varieties that are growing under these conditions 
it's quite an easy thing to overlook you do have to think of a whole series of 
th-, of things depending on how broadly you expect the the two that you're 
producing to grow what are the soil conditions what sort of rainfalls what sort 
of basic environmental conditions such as er hours of sunlight are you going to 
be exposed to but very importantly is what type of husbandry practice what type 
of farming system basically is it going to be to be grown under mostly of 
course breeders are producing for large-scale production they are not usually 
selecting for smallholder production but nevertheless there are quite a variety 
of different ways in which you can grow crops okay so this is something which 
is important to bear in mind so the objectives of the plant breeder are to 
increase usable yield increase stability make the crop more nutritive reduce 
ecological disadvantages and produce types that basically suit the growing 
conditions and the needs of the 
people who are growing them there are however as i pointed out at the start 
were the number of other factors that you need to worry about and the most 
difficult one as i said from the start is that you're going to have to predict 
what this is going to be like in the future not what it is today probably as i 
said to you the minimum is probably about seven years in the future now in some 
ways environmentally that might not be too bad even with global warming seven 
years is a moderately short time scale so you could maybe er do a reasonable 
job on that but how are you going to predict what for instance the political 
situation is going to be what is going to be the position with regard for 
instance the subsidies or what have you what crops will farmers want to grow 
what will the end-user want you only have to think of the changes that have 
occurred in food consumption in this country or any of the developing ones to 
see what happens in the in the developed ones i mean in the
developing ones the same thing is true what is going to be the requirements 
when i started as a plant breeder as a potato breeder at least then the 
selection was all for a medium-size potato tuber that was what were required by 
the housewife and all the rest of it all the small ones used to throw away and 
the great big ones were useless and they were also given for animal feed 
because there was no real use for them so all the breeding was for this size 
tuber within a few years of course the big tubers started getting a premium 
because they're used for bakers and you can sell those and throw the rest away 
if you want to although you don't you use them so there's a premium on those 
and they even sell the small ones then they pretend they're Earlies and sell 
those at a premium so the whole thing reversed within really a few years now as 
a plant breeder adjusting to that is really quite difficult okay so you have to 
do some crystal ball gazing and it's difficult 
to get it right you have to bear that in mind so of course one of your 
strategies may be to put some adaptability into your breeding programme so that 
you can move in different directions not just selecting for a single er 
particular picture another question that you might er try and ask as a plant 
breeder is what is going to be the spectrum of pests and diseases in seven 
years' time and i can assure you these do move and do change quite a lot over 
time er certainly we produced varieties that by the time we got them to the 
field were susceptible to one of the most common diseases around and they were 
useless so the reality of predicting is difficult but you do need to do 
something about it okay so they're real problems in terms of the breeder 
defining the aims and objectives but if we ignore that the next question is 
really how do we go about trying to achieve these aims and objectives and 
that's really what what the course is about now i'm sure you've all 
got some reasonable ideas from the lectures you've already er been to about the 
some of the general features of plant breeding but basically one of you can 
break it down into really three steps and these are common to every breeding 
programme now the details of them may differ but nevertheless you require all 
these all these three steps to be able to to to carry out plant breeding the 
first thing you need to do is to either release or produce genetic variation if 
you want to select for something that's different you've got to have a 
difference there to start with if they're all the same then clearly there's no 
point doing anything now to do that as i say you need variation that is 
genetical you need things that are inherited the two things may look different 
and by that we say the phenotypes are different in other words their appearance 
is different but they need to be genetically different if it's going to be 
inherited by their offspring and therefore we make 
progress with plant breeding so we need to be able to produce and release 
genetic variation and i'm sure you're all know very well what is the most 
obvious and straightforward way to produce genetic variation and it is 
[laughter] no 
sm0189: 
nm0187: sorry 
sm0189: it's hybrids 
nm0187: yeah sexual reproduction er i-, i-, i-, so yeah it is a very obvious 
answer so sexual reproduction is the most common er form of releasing variation 
in plant breeding and in virtually all plant breeding programmes that is the 
source of genetic variation so we take two lines which have between them the 
characters or the expressions of the characters we want we cross them we 
produce usually the first generation from that you then have various options 
but one of the obvious things to do is to sell er that to produce segregation 
so we get the differences to segregate out and we try then to select the ones 
which have the right combination characters all the plus points together in one 
in one particular 
genotype in other words we look for recombinants okay er it sounds i know very 
simplistic but that is basically in w-, in most plant breeding programmes what 
you're trying to do you're trying to put together the characters from different 
lines into one line you have to identify it er and therefore do something with 
it okay so that covers the second part in a way we need to produce the 
variation we need to select amongst it okay when we have selected amongst it we 
need to stabilize it to do something with it we're going back up to here sexual 
reproduction is the commonest way of producing the variation but it's not the 
only way there are other possibilities one is to induce mutations and we'll 
talk a bit about that and you can do this in various ways mutations are 
naturally-occurring events but you can increase their frequency by using a 
mutagen ionizing radiation for example here's one and this is used in plant 
breeding in a number of crops quite a few of the clonally-reproduced 
crops like apples for example mutations er are used and we'll discuss that a 
bit in the in the course we can also try and although it's in some ways it's 
sexual reproduction it usually needs some help we can use wild ancestors or 
related species to cross with our cultivated species to increase the amount of 
variation we have 
available to try and perhaps introduce characters where we don't seem to have 
variation in the domesticated forms and the other possibility of course now is 
the newer techniques such as for instance genetic transformation genetic 
manipulation whichever you want to call it and of course that provides us 
another possibility in this release production of variation really whatever 
source of variation we use though the im-, or or probably the most important er 
criteria is the selection of the parents unless you selected what parents to 
start with you've already got a major uphill battle so on here i've written it 
as the critical factor okay so unless you have good starting point you're 
always going to be struggling so you need to choose the parent and that might 
sound relatively easy and it can be if for example you use a cultivar that's 
been widely grown so things are known about its performance because the 
difficulty and i hope this is 
not a completely new concept to you you should have covered it before but what 
we see is the phenotype okay so what i'm looking at in terms of seeing you is 
your phenotypes okay it's what you see is the phenotype the phenotype is made 
up of the genotype what genes you've got and how they're being expressed in 
other words what's inherited from your parents is being but it's also a product 
of your environment okay what conditions you grow in what food you've had all 
these things which determine er then how you appear you can easily for instance 
affect people's height by their nutrition or at least relatively easily so you 
only have to look at their history the other complicated factor is that the 
genotype interacts with the environment different people given exactly the same 
food react differently er different conditions et cetera okay so when we look 
at something unfortunately we have this complex of underlying factors and the 
thing that's critical to 
us as a plant breeder okay we can exploit the interactions geno times env but 
really what we're interested in is this part okay but these other things can be 
major and mask which bit is genetic and you don't know so when we're talking 
about the choice of parent this is a complicating factor and it's a a factor 
that will come in elsewhere as well when we are looking at this er but this 
business of wanting the genotype be-, but only being able to observe the 
phenotype is a is a major drawback okay so having done that we've chosen the 
parents we've done something about releasing the variation probably sexual 
reproduction but could be other things we now need to select amongst the 
variation again on first thought that seems kind of easy just go and have a 
look see what's good and take it and all the rest of it but the first thing you 
need to decide is what characters are going to be selected again this seems 
fairly straightforward but first of all you have to realize 
that many characters are actually quite difficult to measure they either take a 
lot of time a lot of energy expensive equipment er or really just a very 
difficult t-, to do the second er thing you need to bear in mind is that you've 
got a lot of material to look at a lot of different ones that you want to 
assess right something we'll come to again in the course and the other problem 
is that you usually have small quantities of it okay so for instance i mean 
taking the very obvious thing you might have two plants how are you going to 
assess yield yield of two plants grown by themselves doesn't er doesn't tell 
you anything very much it's nothing about er what it'll what it'll actually er 
grow like and also for disease for instance so quite often er for disease 
assessment they will take er detached leaves because there simply isn't enough 
material you cannot have different densities of sowing you cannot er plant 
material er that er can be grown exactly as you would like in agriculture so 
the question is how are you going to reproduce the conditions of agriculture 
you can't totally so you have to pick a single condition and work on that basis 
and hope it's representative you cannot as i say grow large plots and see how 
they behave you've only got a small amount of material a small amount of 
material also means that you have questions about the relevance of what you're 
measuring and the characters you're assessing to agriculture itself so you can 
talk to pathologists and they can tell you how they can take single leaves from 
plants they can expose them to diseases and they get a reaction to it but this 
doesn't always tie up with field performance so the relevance of the characters 
as well as the effectiveness that you can measure them is extremely important 
the next problem we have is really the one that we were talking about a few 
minutes ago and i said it would come back up and that is the efficiency with 
which we can select so back to the 
phenotype versus the genotype [cough] as i think is fairly obvious from th-, 
from the equation the greater the environmental effects the more the phenotype 
will be a poor reflection of the underlying genotype okay so the more 
something's affected by the environment the less we can do anything about er 
picking it because we won't be picking the genotype at all we'll just be 
picking the effect of the environment all the time so this creates er a real 
problem particularly as many of the characters we're dealing with are not the 
simple ones that Mendel had you don't get tall and short pink or white these 
sorts of characters we get characters like yield like number of ears so if you 
think for instance the character that's similar in humans is height you are all 
different heights but the fact there's not one of you here that's a major g-, 
has a major gene difference for height in other words there's no achondroplasic 
dwarves but they do occur in the population there 
are major genes for height but most of you differ for height by a lot of genes 
there's a lot of different genes will affect your height and so what we're 
seeing is the effect of all the genes okay plus the environment and all the 
rest of it but there's a lot of genes there so it's not easy to say what's 
genotype and what's phenotype okay [cough] so to try and get out of some of 
those problem we have to find ways of trying to get some sort of assessment of 
what amount of the variation might be genetic and what might be er 
environmental and we can get a measure of something called the heritability 
again which we'll come to later in the lecture course which effectively just 
measures the proportion of the variation or tries to of the total variation 
that's genetic so it gives us some sort of estimate of how efficient or how 
effective our selection's going to be [cough] it's something i'll talk about 
when we talk about heritability and you get various discussions of this mostly 
in er not 
perhaps quite so much recently but er not too long ago about I-Q in humans of 
what heritability was and what this meant and how this affected racism and all 
the rest of it the thing you have to remember is there's no such thing as the 
heritability the heritability is only estimated for a particular population a 
particular point in time er so there's no there's no general measure for it but 
it gives us some some idea about how er how we might proceed and the reason i'm 
stressing that it changes is because we can change it as plant breeders we 
change it because we're doing the selection but we can also change it by the 
way we carry out our trials if we replicate things okay we replicate things we 
can take the mean if we take the mean we know it more precisely the more 
observations that go into the mean the more precisely we know and the more 
precisely we know it the more we can increase the heritability okay we reduce 
the environmental effects compar-, compared to 
the genotypic effects now you can do this in various ways you can simply 
replicate the trials so that decreases the local environmental variation we 
could replicate it over different trial sites so we start to change the how 
sure we are about its repeatability over different regions we can do it in 
different countries we can do it in different seasons okay so we can change the 
heritability and we can also change the repeatability of our measurements but 
[cough] but the trouble is each time we do that we increase the workload so if 
we have two replicates we've already doubled the amount of material we have to 
grow you then grow it at another site you've doubled it again usually there is 
a very real limit on how much you can cope with or how much you can grow or how 
much seed you've got so normally what it means is that you look at less 
material so if you double the number of replicates you halve the amount of 
lines you look at so you gain on one thing and you lose on 
another okay so it's again it's something we need to consider as we er go 
through the course that this is a a problem we can increase precision in one 
way but if we do that we then reduce how much material we can look at and we 
then reduce the efficiency of selection [cough] [hum] okay but we carry out our 
selection in ways that we'll er see as we go through the course having done 
that you end up with an amount of material which you need to stabilize you need 
to be able to repo-, reproduce this material if it's going to be exploited in 
er any way at all and you need to multiply it so you'd need to multiply it 
stably okay otherwise i mean what's the point of having one seed which is just 
what you want what can you do with it [cough] now this is where the different 
types of crop plants er tend to be more different the main er criteria that are 
used for separating plants in terms of plant breeding are to do with their 
breeding system and three main er types that are recognized are inbreeding 
outbreeding and 
vegetatively reproduced crops and we'll go into these in er in in the next 
lecture they i think are fairly self-explanatory inbred crops mean that they 
can be selfed you can therefore make them true breeding therefore of course you 
can multiply them without too much problem vegeti-, vegetatively reproduced 
crops are ones which you reproduce asexually and therefore you can multiply 
them up without changing their genotypes at all potatoes are a good example 
they produce tubers you plant a tuber you get more tubers they're all the same 
genotype so they're not too much of a problem the outbred ones [laugh] we need 
to talk about as we go along er more these are really because they're all 
genetically different you need to treat them more as a population so you try 
and keep the population the same rather than the individuals okay so with 
inbreeders we can have individuals which are exactly identical for the 
outbreeders it's really the populations of the things that need to be
stable and you have to have ways of doing that [cough] okay so that's really i 
think as much as i want to say on that part i don't know if there are any 
questions so as you might guess now if you look back the next three weeks what 
i'll try and do is cover those three main groups to give you the basis of the 
breeding of the different groups and then we'll go on to other things okay so 
any questions i've completely confused you now [laughter] no 
sm0188: er you have one question er can we just last minute here's the wheat in 
Germany and look like a grass but has roots and from the roots there comes 
another 
nm0187: yeah 
sm0188: and then it's like a potato common crop right 
nm0187: yes yeah yeah i er 
sm0188: i know 
nm0187: i'm not sure whether it's it's wheat or not but i mean i-, it it can be 
from the same family but there are quite a number of plant species certainly a 
number of the grasses that reproduce by stolons er the other way that you can 
get clonal crops of course is to take cuttings 
sm0188: just like apples yeah 
nm0187: apples is a good example you take cuttings put it onto a rootstock and 
you can reproduce them er various ways as is say there are quite a lot of er 
things sugar cane you cut sugar cane down chop it into pieces plant the 
pieces and they all grow yeah ornamental c-, er plants quite a lot of them are 
vegetatively reproduced yeah okay well if there are questions i mean c-, ask 
any time about them what i'd like to do then if we cover that is to tell you a 
bit more about the posters and this sort of thing er yeah is that okay 
right oh no one more thing sorry reading list there's a list of er they're 
really there's just books 'cause these are are general i don't s-, suggest for 
one minute you have to go away and read all these books or you necessarily have 
to read one of them all the way through but if you're looking er to cover the 
more general things then books are about the best way of er of doing it er it's 
up to you sh-, i put all of these i think all apart from the first one on seven 
day loan that's not to restrict you and i hope it doesn't cause you too much 
problems but it seemed the fairest way of 
making sure people could all access them otherwise the first person there takes 
the books out and that's it for the term okay er and there are a number of 
copies of er a number of them it's it's really up to you which ones er you want 
if you want to talk about them at all i i can do but i i just tried to give you 
some of the general er books the book in fact by Bosemark is probably the more 
specific or the more er restricted of the other ones the other ones are more 
general than that and that's why it was written to be more restrictive yeah 
okay good right more paper hopefully most weeks there won't be so much paper 
but [hum] okay so the first thing that of course you need to do is to pick an 
area or a topic on which you're going to do the necessary reading find out 
about things and then produce your poster and essay okay now these are just 
ideas they're not they're not the only 
things you can do but i thought rather than present you with a you know it's 
like at school they tell you can write an essay on anything and that's the 
worst possible situation so these are ideas clearly it's got to be a restricted 
area i mean you know you can't talk about er you know plant breeding in general 
or er micropropagating plants in a you need to to talk about say 
micropropagation of strawberries or you know breeding sugar cane for drought 
tolerance y-, y-, you need a fairly restricted area and that's why i want to 
agree with you what the topic is so that A it's not impossible for you to do 
for being too wide but on the other hand there's enough chance of you finding 
some literature and something to say about it a kind of blank at the end is not 
going to be very useful okay so have a think about it i mean clearly to to a 
certain extent it depends on what your interests are er and what have you and 
hopefully we can come 
to an even better topic which you can find enough about you can present it and 
i say what er we want you to do is to produce the poster and the essay which 
okay is part of the assessment but also other people can look at you can answer 
questions about it and all learn from each other okay so to do that just so 
that i can th-, also remember what the there was happening there's er you need 
to fill in a form one part i'll keep and one part you'll keep so we need to do 
that probably er whenever you wish but by er certainly by the end of next week 
need to not because i want to press you about it but clearly if i leave it long 
making the decision then you're not going to have much time to actually do the 
to do the er research and produce the material okay so we need to decide fairly 
fairly quickly if you want to come and see me in the week or anything that's 
fine er but have a s-, about it have quick er chat and if it's okay then you 
can go ahead on it all right 
sm0189: 
so any of these er categories here you can just see just select this the number 
of these categories 
nm0187: yeah you cou-, y-, yes 
sm0189: 
nm0187: i mean it's just to give you a yes yeah yeah so i mean you can just 
pick on to know for instance transformation for drought resistance or er 
sm0189: yeah so you wouldn't use a number you'd just use one of them or 
nm0187: you'd use one of them or part of them i mean s-, s-, silly i mean you 
know a a a topic called storage 
sm0189: right okay 
nm0187: is much too wide you know storage of apples or stora-, 
sm0189: yeah
nm0187: i i just put down ideas to give something to to to start with 
sm0189: 
nm0187: yeah i mean do think about the reality of how much you're going to read 
about this and how much you're going to get written down 
sm0189: yeah 
nm0187: to make it sensible yeah okay now to go a bit further 'cause in 
fairness to you you need to know what's important in producing your poster and 
i'd 
rather tell you about it now so that you know when you're doing it rather than 
spe-, spring it on you at the end okay so as i say you'll present your poster 
to all the other people i want each of you then to mark or give assessments of 
everybody else's things now this is not for you to be nasty to each other 
[laughter] and it's no good then saying everybody's i-, is an A er i want you 
to be realistic obviously and i've suggested here the criteria that we'll use 
for this there are th-, beally three parts to the poster first of all is the 
general appearance and presentation of it er if you ever go to or you probably 
will start going to scientific meetings the the first thing is there's you know 
there may be a hundred of them there you're not going to look at all of them so 
the first thing you do is just got to see which ones look nice or pretty or 
something you know anything which will which will 
attract you and so you go to it okay so i-, you know they don't have to be 
pretty pretty or they don't have to be wild or anything but they must be 
visually reasonable and p-, have some reason for you would want to read it you 
know there's lots of tiny little writing and nothing much there you you 
actually don't spend much time with them okay then when you get that far the 
next important thing is the content and the information that it gives to you 
okay now you should remember with a poster that and this is the difference 
between your poster and your essay the poster should be enough to interest 
people and to make them want to ask you some more questions and be intelligible 
they don't necessarily cover every last bit of the subject okay because there 
really is a limit to how many words and things you should put on the poster it 
really should be something that visually interests people and gets them 
interested rather than answer every question okay so don't be tempted to try 
and cover every possible thing you found out about the subject cram it on to 
your poster okay yeah then the next part or the last part is is background 
knowledge and this is where er really i say i want the rest of you to ask 
questions er but not t-, to try and catch them out but just to make sure you've 
understood what they've said perhaps because what they said is quite 
interesting and all the rest of it and so er that's what that part is so that's 
the three er major er parts that will be assessed and i tried to er on the back 
of the sheet take out the assessment criteria so that er you go from A to E all 
the time so we keep it fairly consistent and give some ideas so for appearance 
and presentation A represents an excellent well presented poster wherea-, E one 
is untidy poorly conceived with little appeal okay i mean it's perf-, i mean 
they're not [laugh] these are not strictly defined criteria but to give you a 
kind of idea so the same for content 
and information A is an informative poster which you gained an interest with a 
satisfactory amount and level of information whereas E is a poster from which 
you gained little if any useful information and not really any interest yeah 
and for the background knowledge represents a well informed presenter whereas 
the presenter that has very little background knowledge so okay they put the 
things down on the poster but that's about [laugh] all they can manage yeah is 
that okay i know it sounds a bit crude but i-, it's it's a if you s-, bear that 
in mind as a sort of criteria i think it'll become fairly obvious and it'll be 
fairly easy to do it yeah 
sm0188: going to be a question about the poster 
nm0187: about the what 
sm0188: about the poster 
nm0187: yeah 
sm0188: er could be er like a and er but it's not er the for example there is 
there's a breeding sheep on it and afterwards you tell people how it's going or 
nm0187: well that's part of how and what i want you to think about about 
designing the the poster if you just put on something with no explanation 
people are not going to get anything from it i mean you've got okay you're 
going to be 
there to answer questions but the poster has got to be free-standing it's going 
to be there and people can look at it and say oh yes you know that's u-huh i 
see that's interesting i wonder what et cetera okay so it's getting a balance 
between having it attractive enough to look at and enough information to convey 
to people the basics of the subject area what it's about what happens what's 
achieved yeah but not necessarily covering all the things it doesn't matter 
that you need to produce twenty lines to do this the fact that you've used some 
lines is okay rather than specifically twenty i-, it's something i think we'll 
have to see a little bit as it goes along you've got a few weeks to to do it 
till you get some help but it it is that balance is the difficult thing between 
just providing loads and loads of information which i-, is very relevant but is 
usually boring and not very er easy to take in and providing something which 
is just one colourful picture and actually you've really got no idea till 
somebody tells you what it's about and what's achieved and how it gets done 
sm0188: is it a little bit like er produce this for example with Powerpoint 
nm0187: yeah you are going to use Powerpoint [laugh] t-, to produce it so 
[laugh] er but it'll be a single it'll be a single page with images on it if 
you imagine at least a me-, we will actually or i'll t-, try er to get them 
printed er for you so you've got a printed poster at the end and if you think 
of them basically well we'll tell you in the next few weeks but basically like 
that one board on the wall you have to produce something which has the images 
and writing on it that's that size including the title your name and you know 
these sorts of things yeah so what you're aiming to do is produce something 
physically like that okay quite a lot of the time you'll do it electronically 
but you've got to see it as that and what we'll basically do is produce that er 
and also probably 
what we'll do is put it onto an acetate sheet so you'll blow it up like this 
actually to to talk to because it's a bit easier for me to handle it this way 
sm0189: have you got an old one of these posters just so we can have a look at 
it and so 
nm0187: yeah 
sm0189: is that all right 
nm0187: yeah 
sm0189: and we did say we'd give you numbers 
nm0187: yeah 
sm0189: and then 
nm0187: yeah yeah er what i've [laugh] what i've do-, i'll let me hand out this 
it'll be easier if i t-, talk about what i'm really thinking about doing this 
is the timetable er so f-, forget the other one this is what i'm we shall be 
working to so this week i've done a bit of handing out the the lists and the 
forms and you've got them and you need to start thinking er next week if you've 
made the choice then you can start doing some background reading and thinking 
about the subject area the week after that er then in lab A in P-S-L yeah where 
the computers are 
sm0189: yeah 
nm0187: then i've got two people namex namex and er namex who will help with 
the technical parts of the computer side of things and answer questions and 
they've also got a sheet about producing the posters and a few tips and these 
sorts of things er and that's where you'll start actually producing and that's 
where also we'll try and get er and er i will remember to bring down copies of 
previous ones so that you can 
sm0189: 
nm0187: have a look and see yeah in fact er i only if i remember i'll bring 
them with me next week 'cause i've got some on acetate 
sm0189: yeah 
nm0187: so we can just quickly look at them here 
sm0189: yeah 
nm0187: er 
sm0188: 
nm0187: yeah but if you go to the P-S-L if you walk around the corridors 
sm0189: yeah 
nm0187: the things that are on the walls are what i'm talking about you 
producing okay so that probably would be the best thing if you had a look at 
that and i'll try and remember to bring some but if you look at those posters 
they're exactly the sort of thing you know i don't say all of them are good so 
don't take it from me [laughter] that i'm saying they're the models for it but 
then they're the sorts of things that you're aiming for the sort of thing that 
we expect er 
people to do yeah er so after week three and from week three onward there is 
there are computers booked in lab A so that you get priority on them and the 
software's there what we'll do is er give you each a zip well you'll have to 
give us a deposit but we'll give you a zip disk each so you've got something to 
work on the software's there okay and then you start to go from there and we'll 
give you what help and advice we we can on you know presentation and things 
like that come to week eight well week seven you need to hand it in week eight 
we'll then start presenting it it depends how many there ends up on the course 
last year i only had about this number when i started by the next week i had 
nineteen so [laugh] we'll see how how many we've got we might just do it in one 
week or two okay so as i say please don't feel nervous about presenting it y-, 
you know it it just the poster up there tell people a little bit about it and 
they'll ask you questions 
it's the same for everybody and it's really not a a big problem okay er and 
then i say we'll make the assessment of it and that's that's it and this your 
essay will be on the same subject area so you don't have to go revise the whole 
or you could look up information on anything else yeah is that okay anybody got 
any 
sm0190: when does the essay have to be in 
nm0187: er in week eight i'm doing that not to make you have a short time doing 
it but as you know most assessments start piling up at the end of term so A 
because we need the posters in then i was trying to make it so that the essay 
in at the same time yeah all right okay excellent well if there are any 
questions well most of you do you know where i am in P-S-L on the first floor 
anyway you'll find me if you ask okay if you want to come and see me okay