Agriculture of the future, Pet applied to the study of plants

Neuromed’s new Pet platform for small animals, dedicated to scientific research, is also applied to plants. Thanks to the European project in the Marie Curie ‘Research And Innovation Staff Exchange’ ‘Petal’ framework, which sees the collaboration between Irccs Neuromed, Ghent University, Otto Von Guericke University Magdeburg, University of Teramo and the Bollino It companies, and Raycan Ltd, the positron emission tomography will now be used to study plant metabolism, providing scientific results that will guide the agriculture of the future. The project was officially launched today with the ‘kick-off meeting’ between all the participants. The Pet Research Platform was born from the collaboration between Neuromed and Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Hust) in Wuhan, China. With this innovative instrument, the technology of positron emission tomography, which many know for its use in the field of human diagnostics, is extended to scientific research on small animals and, from the early days of 2020, also to plants. “This project – says Nicola D’Ascenzo, head of the Department of Medical Physics and Neuromed Engineering – is one of the first in the world to use Pet for the study of plants. Plants are living organisms, with metabolic processes. processes that we will now study, in order to understand not only normal metabolism, but also how a plant reacts to stress, for example in drought conditions, or in the face of climate change phenomena “. “Thanks to Pet – explains Michele Pisante, professor of Agronomy and herbaceous crops at the University of Teramo – we will be able to understand the response mechanisms of cultivated plants to different conditions of water availability and mineral elements, but also to frequent alterations of the spectrum that occur during the growth and development phases. The possibility of carrying out non-invasive direct measurements on plants in real time, allows you to follow the evolution of a given phenomenon over time. It follows that the identification of a reliable method for the timely and early verification of the sub-optimal breeding conditions of cultivated plants represents a topic of significant interest, especially if associated with the biochemical variations that occur in plant tissues. The use of advanced digital technologies represents an effective and important support for the monitoring of such changes “. What are the abilities of a particular cultivated plant to adapt to water shortages? How does a plant react to climate change due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? These are just some of the questions that the project will try to answer based on scientific evidence. The goal is to provide innovative knowledge, which will guide future choices for a more sustainable agriculture, increasingly capable of reacting to challenges and able to support the needs of a growing world population. Without forgetting the educational aspect: the collaboration between Neuromed and the University will help to train researchers with absolutely new transdisciplinary skills, accustomed to thinking and managing the unstoppable complexity of phenomena. “This project – continues D’Ascenzo – represents the strategy we have chosen for our Center: not to limit ourselves to medicine, but to extend research to the life sciences in general. The application in agriculture is the best example of this approach “. “A research center – comments Giovanni de Gaetano, president of Irccs Neuromed – must never isolate itself from the territory and from people’s lives, and with this project we are demonstrating it once again. Defending people’s health means preventing and treating pathologies , of course, but also to think about the environment and the great challenges that await the whole of humanity. And of course the research carried out in this center will be able to acquire great value first of all for the territory that surrounds us, for growers and producers. of the agri-food chain “.