[Music]
I'm obsessed with food I am a weekend
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 lychees in the dong hua
man night market when in Seattle the
morel mushrooms in the pike market and
when in palermo the key ogia beats in
the bar Laura but I'm not alone
food is amongst the most photographed
subjects on the internet and there are 4
billion recipes floating around and at
the end of this I will hit you with yet
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 crabby mother a
snappy daughter and impatient scientist
I'm not myself when I'm hungry even
momentarily yet I'm painfully aware that
many around the world struggle to meet
their daily basic caloric needs 15
percent of the world goes hungry every
day and a lot of them systematically and
3 million children die every year out of
insufficient food and 2 billion are in a
downward spiral of malnutrition in the
last 200 years our population has grown
by a factor of seven and the current 7
billion is projected to be 10 by 2050
and in the last century alone we lost 75
percent 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 like corn rice
sorghum
and such and a few animal species so the
worry about safe and sustained food
supply to feed the current and future
planet is real 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 avacado a divine delight of a fruit
isn't a threat from a fungal infection
Laurel wilt right here in the US and I
cannot imagine a world without chocolate
and did you know that chocolate grows on
trees witch's broom a fungal infection /
production of cacao by 80% in Brazil a
few decades ago so these incursions not
just endanger our favourite food crops
but they also pushed small farmers after
the farm line into city shanty towns
today we are one global village a
scourge in one corner rapidly spreads to
the others and the plunging biodiversity
puts at risk the food supply not just up
vulnerable countries but also those that
are rolling in plenty now what do we do
we are unhappy with chemicals whether in
fertilizers or in pesticides we had even
more wary of GMOs or genetically
modified organisms although there is no
scientific evidence yet we fear what
unintended consequences GMOs may bring
can we get around this I think we can as
you know agriculture is an evolutionary
masterstroke of the last 10,000 years
and plants have been around for millions
of years in nature continues to carry
her experiments and we see the results
all around us she's talking to us
through her variety and the array of
flora
we must sit up and listen my Silver
Bullet is to ferret out and use this
diversity that already exists within the
DNA of the plant populations we don't
have to manipulate the plants with
exogenous or external elements but we
unlock the secrets that already exists
between the plants an organic approach
to an organic problem how can we achieve
this genome and mathematics so
fortunately we are in the throes of a
genomic revolution the cost of DNA
sequencing has come down a million fold
its power has gone up a thousandfold
what does this entail anything around us
with an iota life in it can be and is
being sequenced but we must make sense
of this deluge of DNA Big Data the usual
suspects like machine learning any I
don't quite make the cut people often
ask me how complex can the genome of a
simple plan be and I say very complex
more complex than their of us humans for
instance we have two copies of a
chromosome a plant can have as many as
22 a humble potato has four copies so
Matt to the rescue but not any kind of
Matt will do in my earlier life I worked
with continuous mathematics the kind
that deals with doubly curved surfaces
such as aircraft wings but then I had a
chance encounter with the genome the
genome with its long strand of just four
letters TCGA is a Willy Wonka chocolate
factory of puzzles the questions we ask
of this discrete not continuous discrete
dcj abstraction of DNA it's like solving
complex puzzles so I turned to discrete
math which is a grownup version of
puzzle solving so I will use the
metaphor of a Sudoku puzzle because I
believe many of you are already familiar
with it
to solve an important problem of
untangling the chromosomes of multiple
copies of nearly identical ones the
nearly identical copies mash up the
chromosome but for a bag of cryptic
rules why the puzzle Sudoku like most
puzzles has its set of fixed rules but
so does my problem with its immutable
constraints furthermore I can show on
this bag of clues into an instance of
Sudoku and piggyback right on the
solution but the pseudo who has integers
but these are only placeholders I simply
replace them with DNA letters and I have
simultaneously untangled the chromosomes
of a population of a species but sudoko
is only a metaphor for the problem in
real life the sizes are bigger the
dimensions are higher than none
mihran complexity of the constraints are
higher and there are many more such
maddeningly hard problems but it is this
mosaic of problem solvers of algorithms
that crack open the door of our
understanding of 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 we did this for the cacao
crop we ground up the client material
extracted its DNA and made sense of it
through a suite of puzzle solvers and
this opened the door for breeding fungus
resistance and good if not better
tasting crop but these puzzle solvers
are agnostic to the species or to the
characteristics what works for cacao
works for avocado potato or even grass
the progenitor of all domesticated rings
it's fascinating to me that we can
connect the dots from diversity to
action through the double helix DNA 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 so smaller
plots of land can be used 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 of scourge
ravaged crops like a cow and avocado
here's a recipe that I promised you
earlier take a hundred gram bar of your
favorite dark chocolate melted and fold
in the pulp of two avocados and voila
full of antioxidants unsaturated fats
and even delicious treat for you thank
you
[Applause]