Product/Service Development

Kin-Ping Wong of Lotus Innovative Sciences in the U. S. proposes to develop the white powdery wax from winter melon into a safe and effective preservative against various biotic stresses for fruits and grains. Mass production of the low-cost preservative could facilitate their transportation from field to market.

Walter Messier of Evolutionary Genomics, Inc. in the U.S. will discover genes in wheat that underlie resistance to Ug99 stem rust by looking for genes that have evolutionary signatures of adaptation. The strategy involves high quality sequencing of RNA from close wild relatives of wheat and doing a comparative analysis, looking for genes under positive selection.

Sally Mackenzie of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the U.S. will establish a strategy to exploit crop phenotype variations that are controlled by epigenetic changes for breeding. The strategy is to disrupt the MSH1 gene in millet and maize, releasing a large amount of variation derived from heritable epigenetic changes that can be used to select for abiotic and biotic stress tolerance.

John Jaenike of the University of Rochester in the U.S. will test if Spiroplasma, a bacterial symbiont in Drosophila that confers resistance to nematodes, can be used in crops to confer resistance to plant-parasitic nematodes. The group will examine the effect of Spiroplasma on plant-parasitic nematodes and will attempt to introduce the bacteria into several plant species.

Jonathan Jones of the Sainsbury Laboratory in the United Kingdom will enhance mutation rates of R gene loci in a targeted fashion by creating transgenic plants with a mutagenic transgene. The mutagenic transgene has sequence-specific DNA binding domains fused to deaminases that mutate cytidine to thymidine (changing C:G base pairs to T:A base pairs), increasing mutation rates specifically at R gene loci. Resulting plants would then be screened for resistance with promising lines backcrossed to remove the mutagenic locus.

Saskia Hogenhout of The John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom will generate whitefly-resistant plants by engineering transgenic cassava plants with RNAi targeted against genes essential to whitefly Bemisia tabaci survival and reproduction.

Maruthi M. N. Gowda of the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom will use a virulent strain of the endosymbiotic bacteria, Wolbachia, as a biocontrol agent for controlling the whitefly, thereby controlling whitefly-transmitted plant viruses. Wolbachia can both inhibit reproduction and egg laying and inhibit virus transmission, and can naturally spread through whitefly populations. The work would identify the appropriate Wolbachia strain and determine the effects on the whitefly.

Elijah Songok of the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kenya will design and test a fortified school meal product with deworming properties for treating soil transmitted helminths (parasitic worms) among schoolchildren in developing countries. Schoolchildren are most at risk of infection-associated morbidities such as stunting and chronic dysentery. However, current mass drug administration strategies are associated with the development of drug resistance, and may not be sustainable long term.

Sara Lustigman of the New York Blood Center in the U.S. will develop a three-dimensional in vitro culturing system to support the development of infective larvae of parasitic filarial worms through to adulthood. Currently adult filarial worms can only be isolated in limited numbers from infected humans or animals, which precludes high throughput drug screening.

Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will establish simple touch screens in Kenyan health clinics to gather immediate feedback from young women seeking reproductive and sexual health services on their experience as they leave the clinic. A negative patient experience during a doctor's appointment has a harmful effect on subsequent health decisions.