The Biotech Podcast

As exciting technologies emerge, we need to ensure that policies and regulations are in place to ensure practices remain safe, sustainable and help the transition towards a circular economy.  Dr Ian Hodge, professor of rural economy at Cambridge, describes how we can manage agriculture in the future; from offering subsidies to introducing carbon credits. 

Many crops currently grown in the developing world are limited by their nitrogen potential rather than their water or light potential. Difficult supply chains and high costs make using nitrogen fertilisers difficult in these regions and the use of these fertilisers brings about its own issues. 

Professor Giles Oldroyd aims to engineer nitrogen fixation into many crops, allowing them to utilise the abundant source of nitrogen straight from the air and therefore improve yields whilst reducing nitrogen leaching. 

As agriculture scales up it brings a host of problems. Larger tractors lead to soil compaction and lack of precision, more workers are required to ensure harvests come in on time and food waste is reduced, and corners are cut more often with increased use of herbicides and pesticides. Using autonomous vehicles can help solve many of these problems. 

Kit Franklin, co-creator of Hands Free Hectare and Hands Free Farm, takes us through the automation of agriculture and how we will soon get used to seeing it in our everyday lives.

A third of global food is produced by smallholder farms. High tech innovations will always make the big headlines, but if want to truly provide for the future then we must also empower those most at risk with more frugal strategies. 

Professor Jaideep Prabhu takes us through his views on how we can do more with less in this latest episode of the The Biotech Podcast.

In the first episode of this new season on food security we first look at what lessons we can draw from the history of agriculture and how we might expect it to change as we look into the future.

Dr Helen Anne Curry is an Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge.

Having founded OpenML, Dr Joaquin Vanschoren wants scientists to make their data public. OpenML aims to use this data to train many machine learning models and therefore create huge advances in this field.

Dr Andrei Lupas takes us through the fundamental building blocks of life: proteins. We analyse what they are, how they've evolved and how they might change in the future. Andrei was also one of the first to see Alphafold in action as he judged them at the CASP protein folding competition, so we explore the possibilities that Alphafold brings.

Dr Andrei Lupas: http://eb.mpg.de/protein-evolution/

 

Computer scientist, Dr Risto Miikkulainen, shows us how we can come up with novel solutions in science by simulating evolution using computers. From bioinformatics to webpage design, the applications of this field are huge.

Image with thanks to Helsingin Sanomat https://www.hs.fi/


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Paper on surprising anecdotes of evolution: https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article/26/2/274/93255/The-Surprising-Creativity-of-Digital-Evolution-A

Microsite on ESP (Evolutionary Surrogate-Assisted Prescription): https://evolution.ml/esp/

Evolutionary Computation software:

• ECJ: https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/
• DEAP: https://github.com/DEAP/deap

Professor Jim Collins talks to us this week about his endeavours in biodetection using Synthetic riboregulators, which have played a significant role in Sars-Cov2 detection. He also brings us through CellNet, which applies network biology to stem cell engineering.

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Photo: Lillie Paquette / MIT School of Engineering

Jim Collins Lab: https://be.mit.edu/directory/james-j-collins

 

This week Dr Wolfgang Busch, from the Salk Institute, talks to us about the importance of root systems. Can roots make decisions? And if so could they be optimised for distinct functions?

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Busch Lab https://busch.salk.edu/ 

Salk Institute: https://www.salk.edu/scientist/wolfgang-busch/