Katalin Solymosi

Biology of crops

Aim of the course:
Students get introduced into the biological (anatomical and physiological) features of the economically most important crops, with details about their cultivation, use and storage. Most important cellular, anatomical and morphological definitions are overviewed and discussed in this context, and other ’culinary’ and economically important expressions (such as fruit, vegetable, cereal) are compared and defined. As an outlook students will be informed about the history of cultivation and about economic, agricultural, and commercial aspects of the most important crops as well as their various uses. The speciality of this course is that it discusses species (starting from algae, fungi and including land plants) on the basis of their economic-industrial application instead of their other (solely biological) features, thus hopefully providing applicable and not only academic information.