Plants are large and thirsty. They require a lot of space and if you want to extract something from them you’ll have to find a way to efficiently extract it from the smorgasbord of chemicals in each and every plant cell. And for that matter plant cells are not all equal, and you may find plenty of product in one cell type but precious little in others....

A sudden breeze, warm and not unwelcome, whips at the hem of your dress as you step aboard the vessel. You mentally scan back through the training sessions you did last month and you take your seat. Helmet on, you sit back in your chair, humming with excitement, ready for your first trip into Space. 5…4….3…2…1 If you think that’s pure science fiction,...

A sudden breeze, warm and not unwelcome, whips at the hem of your dress as you step aboard the vessel. You mentally scan back through the training sessions you did last month and you take your seat. Helmet on, you sit back in your chair, humming with excitement, ready for your first trip into Space. 5…4….3…2…1 If you think that’s pure science fiction,...

Engineering needs tools. Tools such as restriction enzymes and CRISPR-Cas9 are vital to synthetic biology. Tools can also be methods such as PCR and transformation techniques. Plant synthetic biology suffers from a lack of tools to manipulate molecular processes inside plant cells in vivo. Enter stage right: A modular temperature sensitive degron...

Engineering needs tools. Tools such as restriction enzymes and CRISPR-Cas9 are vital to synthetic biology. Tools can also be methods such as PCR and transformation techniques. Plant synthetic biology suffers from a lack of tools to manipulate molecular processes inside plant cells in vivo. Enter stage right: A modular temperature sensitive degron...

Get them lab supplies, funding, and higher education infrastructure. That’s my naive response to anyone asking me how to boost agricultural biotechnology in Africa. And I would suggest that implementing existing technologies is more important than developing new ones: in particular access to clean seed and high-yield crop varieties as well as classical breeding...