Agriculture

John Brassil of Functional Circulation LLC in the U.S. will augment the bowls used by women to transport cassava roots to market by incorporating pest controlling elements and passive communicating elements such as radio-frequency identification (RFID). Pest repellant materials will be molded into the inner surface of the bowls or applied post-processing. Bowls will also be fitted with communication devices such as RFID that could be used in epidemiological and agricultural studies.

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.

Ranjan Shrestha of SNV (Netherlands Development Organization) in Rwanda will facilitate communication between smallholder coffee producers and district coffee taskforces to boost the coffee sector in Rwanda. District coffee taskforces composed of public, private, and non-profit members meet quarterly to discuss current issues, including production and market access, and to develop action plans. Coffee producers are largely excluded from these proceedings due to communication barriers.

Shaun Ferris of Catholic Relief Services in the U.S. will build and test different ways of obtaining feedback from farmers who are using business-focused agricultural services, which his organization provides. This suite of services, including courses on business planning and production, is designed to improve farmer productivity and profitability using a system of web-based applications and mobile phone information delivery. To transfer the management of some of these services back to the local communities, they need feedback on their performance and value in the field.

Geraldine Taylor and colleagues at The Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom will develop a thermo-tolerant vaccine based on human adenovirus 5 (Ad5) against peste des petits ruminants (PPR), a highly contagious disease found in goats and sheep, that enables the distinction between infected and vaccinated animals (known as DIVA vaccines). Current live attenuated vaccines require cold storage, which is unavailable in many developing countries, and vaccinated animals cannot be differentiated from infected animals, complicating disease control efforts.

Syed Abbas of the Public Health Foundation of India in India, with colleagues Manish Kakkar and Krishna Rao, will adapt a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis approach to integrate different perspectives from the animal, environment, and human health sectors on the impact and intervention scenarios of zoonotic diseases, which infect animals and humans. The impact of a single disease and the effects of a specific intervention strategy affect the sectors in different ways.