We posed this question to Brian Thomas from the University of Warwick and Claire Domoney form the John Innes Centre...

Brian -   Well I think it’s not really a question of one or the other because I think as we’ve heard earlier, the manufacture of fertilisers involves a major amount of energy and contributes significantly to greenhouse gases, and therefore, you have to burn fossil fuels to obtain the fertiliser in the first place.  I think in terms of fertiliser, it is possible to mitigate some of these problems.  For example, as we’ve heard with plants that fix nitrogen, if we could extend that capability to others, that would help if we had a more efficient process for fixing nitrogen, more efficient than the Haber process, or we can get plants that use nitrogen more efficiently and there’s a lot of work going on at the moment looking at the genetics of that particular aspect of crop production.

Claire -   Yes and I think there is some debate as to how much of applied nitrogen fertiliser ends up as nitrous oxide. The IPCC estimates at about 1% ends up as nitrous oxide, but there are some papers in the literature which suggests that that’s a three or four-fold underestimate, and it could in fact be much higher than that.  So, I think there’s a lot of discussion as to how much, but nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas, much more potent than carbon dioxide by several hundred times.

We put this to Claire Domoney, from the John Innes Centre:

Claire -   No.  Actually, it’s a member of the Vigna genus if I remember correctly and certainly not a pea.

[Other members of the genus Vigna include the Azuki Bean, Mung bean and Cowpea. Peas are Pisum sativum.]

We put this to Claire Domoney from the John Innes Centre and Brian Thomas from Warwick University:

Claire -   I can say this isn't something we’ve come across in the lab, so this is news to me, but yes.  It certainly sounds like an industrial problem that needs to be tackled.  This is just one of the markets, of course, because the vining and canning peas are harvested at the immature stage so we don't have that problem with those, but the combining peas for animal feed and for marrow fats, these are the edible export markets.  I guess that’s the problem that’s being refered to.  But as I said, it’s not one I've come across.

Chris -   And Brian [Thomas], does this sort of thing get taken into account in models like yours? Obviously, it’s easy to keep adding things but have we thought about how we get the crops in and how that may change in a warmer world?

Brian -   Not particularly in the work that we’ve been doing.  But I guess there is a lot of work, looking at total carbon footprinting of production systems going on at the moment.  This would be one of the factors along with where you produce them and how you transport them around, and the logistics of that.  So this whole "total energy balance" of how we produce crops is a live issue at the moment.

Well this is a process called metastasis and basically, it happens when, as cancers kind of evolve within the body, eventually the cells evolve the properties that they can start to breakaway from the starting primary tumour.  They spread through the bloodstream or through the lymphatic system, and they set up home and start growing somewhere else.  Often, this is in organs like the lungs, the liver and the brain.  We’re not entirely sure why they pick those areas.  It’s sometimes thought it’s because they're areas of high blood flow.  But there may also be biochemical properties of different parts of the body that different cancers like to spread to.  So it’s an area that’s really under a lot of active research, and is an area that hopefully we can make progress in in the future because if we can stop cancer from spreading, that would really be the root to beating it properly.