Professor Michael Udvardi

Genetics and Genomics of Symbiotic Nitrogen Fixation: Past, Present and Future

Legumes contribute about 50 million tonnes of nitrogen, worth about $50 billion, to protein production and agricultural soils each year via symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF) with bacteria called rhizobia. Over the past 50 years, this natural process has been overshadowed by industrial production and use of industrial fertilizers, now well over 120 million tonnes per year, which have become essential for food security but undermine environment and human health. Legumes offer a sustainable solution to food security without environmental harm, if only they were used more intensively in agricultural systems. To make them more attractive to producers, plant breeders are working to increase legume resistance to plant diseases, tolerance to drought, heat and other abiotic stresses, and yield and quality of the seed and biomass they produce. There are also opportunities to increase the fraction of nitrogen that legumes obtain from the atmosphere versus the soil, via improvements in SNF. Over the past 20 years, genetic and genomic research has uncovered over 200 plant genes that are required for SNF, some of which I will describe in my presentation. At the same time, it has become clear that there is substantial natural variation in SNF effectiveness within plant species that could be harnessed via genome-enabled plant breeding to enhance this important process, as I will explain. In a world full of wicked, hard-to-solve problems, there is hope that we can solve the current nitrogen problem confronting humanity and planet earth.

Biography

Dr. Udvardi earned his Ph.D. in plant biochemistry from the Australian National University in 1989. He is primarily interested in how plants obtain nitrogen for growth and protein production, either as mineral nitrogen from the soil or from atmospheric di-nitrogen via symbiotic nitrogen fixation in bacteria. He has contributed to our understanding of symbiotic nitrogen fixation in legumes, especially of transport and metabolism in root nodules, using biochemical, molecular, genetic, and genomic methods. He was amongst the first to characterize ammonium and nitrate transporters in plants. He was part of a large international team that sequenced and analyzed the genome of the model legume, Medicago truncatula. Currently, his group focusses on the development of pan-genomic resources to accelerate breeding of tropical pulses, including mungbean and pigeonpea.

Dr. Udvardi has published over 200 papers in refereed scientific journals. He was Elected Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science in 2012 for his contributions to our understanding of legume biology, especially symbiotic nitrogen fixation.

Website: https://qaafi.uq.edu.au/profile/10442/michael-udvardi and https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Yz19c0oAAAAJ&hl=en