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TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-06-03
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqcX2GcUY-o
my friend and fellow Ted fellow Bonham fists Morigi from Kenya says there are two most powerful days in your life the day you were born and the day you discover why most of us know when we were born but how many of us actually know why I was born study white flies in East Africa and I'm here today to tell you how I know that by
putting the spotlight on the strongest people on the planet the small holder farmers in East Africa why are they the strongest people on the planet these women yes eighty percent of the farmers are women they work day in and day out on the farm with babies on their backs and hand tools to grow all the food the family needs for an entire year they face harsh
conditions drought rising temperature past diseases there's no back up plan crops fail the family is going to indoor a very long hunger season one of the major pests that these farmers face or white lies white flies with the Latin name but he's yet to bassy are the world's most devastating insect pests they have a global distribution they transmit plant viruses become insecticide resistant they all look
alike ultimately causing billions of dollars in damage sheer so the white flies use their style let or modified mouth part to feed on the leaves of over six hundred plants it's during this feeding that the white flies transmits the viruses from the white flight to the plant much like what a mosquito feeds on us they transmit a malarial parasite so all of this six hundred plants
fifties white flies speed on arguably the most important is cassava as seen here with my friend Dr Donald catchy gamba kasaba leaves and roots are eaten by millions of people in South America Southeast Asia and many countries in Africa in fact many of you have even seen or eaten cassava as it makes up the small balls and bubble tea it is also the main ingredient in
tapioca pudding but for many in East Africa staple food in fact eight hundred million people rely on cassava for their daily calories eight hundred million you see kasaba is a poverty fighter if a small scale family farmer has healthy kasaba they can feed their family and they have enough to sell at the market to generate income for important things like school fees medical expenses and saving
but kasaba is under attack in East Africa by white flies white flies are transmitting to devastating viruses pasaba mosaic disease and cassava brown streak disease so the viruses coupled with the white flight speeding kill the plant and also destroyed the roots as you see there by the brown rotten tissue deeming them inedible if there's no kasaba there's no food or income for millions of people in
East Africa this became apparent to me on my first trip to Kenya sitting on this bus with scientists we were traveling from one small holder farm to the next and on the highway we came upon an accident and I noticed everybody on the bus getting very quiet and then I looked over my left shoulder and I saw that a flatbed truck had crashed into a ditch
and all of the contents on the back of the truck were spilled into the ditch I also noticed that there were armed guards standing on top of the contents and I saw two hundred men standing at the top of the ditch looking down and pushing forward towards the contents and it was like an armored car had tipped over and there was money lying in the ditch
so I turn to my colleagues on the bus and I said what is it that everybody wants so desperately and they turned to me and said fertilizer no further explanation was needed because you see if those men could get a bag of fertilizer and take it back to the farm it could mean that their family would go from no meals a day two one two or
three and it was in on this bus in that moment that I went I'm all in I'm all in I am here to use everything I have to hope saved the cassava and so I joined this global team of white firefighters and three of my colleagues are in the audience here today so this is really really special for me to be up here but here's the
rest of the team and our sole focus is to increase cassava production strongest women on the planet though small holder farmers in East Africa and so what is my role on this team my role on the team is to use genomics phylogenetics and supercomputing study the speciation of white flies so as I said at the beginning all the white flies around the world they'll look alike
so the only way we can tell them apart is to use genetics and so we take individual quite flies and we isolate their DNA and then we need to look for patterns of to put them together so we use a supercomputer which is actually here in Perth called Magnus and this supercomputer generates a phylogenetic tree so phylogenetic trees can be interpreted much like family trees lines
touching indicate more closely related individuals so this diagram shows that there are thirty four species of white flies around the world which means that we need to protect cassava from more than one enemy and the species ation information is also passed to the breeders and other scientists to ensure that we give the farmers in East Africa kasaba that's resistant to the correct species a white pride
and the correct species of virus but the thing is generating those phylogenetic trees is intense so if we have ten samples this is how many possible phylogenetic trees there are and we have thousands so you can see that we need supercomputing to figure out the best possible solution but the problem here now is that my colleagues in East Africa are having to bring all of their
data and sometimes their genetic material to our lab into work here with colleagues which is fantastic I love it but in reality the clock is ticking in East Africa the viruses are spreading the white visor spreading and really slows down the progress of actually controlling the White flies in the viruses so a clear solution is that we need to increase the computational biology capacity in East
Africa and a really good place to start is here in professor Lobo be living stones applied mathematics group at Macquarie university in Uganda these young mathematicians need opportunities in addition we need DNA sequencing tense just like were deployed in West Africa to study Ebola we need those technologies and those sequencing tense on the ground in East Africa so that we can prevent the spread of the
white flies that we can prevent the spread of the viruses just like it was done for Ebola luckily we have regional molecular labs in these countries thanks to doctor Joseph no gurus virus diagnostic team we also need to make sure that all of this genetic data that we're collecting is open source so at the university of Western Australia we're developing white fly base which is going
to take all of the data the speciation data and put it in an open source place so that all of our colleagues all around the world have access to this data so we need computational biology capacity in East Africa we need those mobile sequencing tense and computers not only to handle cassava and viruses but we have to empower the scientists and the people of East Africa
to be able to handle their own outbreaks before it becomes an outbreak so there you have it I was born study one vegetable now granted this one vegetable is the key thing eight hundred million people survival so if we're going to save the cassava it's gonna take all of us not just the agricultural sector it's gonna take social media gurus tweak people it's going to take
producers it's going to take supercomputing experts and not working people and mathematicians and statisticians and database developers and even computational biologist like myself I challenge all of you to continue searching for why you were born and in the meantime use your skills for meaningful things like saving the cassava or giving a voice to the voiceless and in those moments you'll find what you were born just
