Technology Opportunities

Summary Available chemically based pesticides cause a large number of negative health and environmental effects including the outcome of residual contamination of land, water, and crops. Subsequently there is a need for improved methods of crop protection, preferably the use of environmental ...

Summary Biomass production by plants and other photosynthetic organisms involves carbon fixation, the process of incorporating inorganic carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Currently carbon fixation by plants and other photosynthetic organisms is the limiting factor in biomass ...

Summary Designer cellulosomes are synthetic multi-enzyme complexes that can degrade cellulosic biomass efficiently and economically. The goal of second generation biofuel production is to efficiently convert agricultural waste, algae and other cellulosic biomass into sugar monomers.Cellulosic ...

Summary Different agricultural crops from Solanaceous species which include tomato, potato and eggplant, overcome oxidative stress by the production of steroidal glycoalkaloids (SGAs) and steroidal saponins. Although SGAs contribute to plant resistance to a wide range of pathogens and predators ...

Summary CRISPR/Cas9 represents a revolutionary jump in genome editing technology, both in terms of flexibility and accuracy. However, an acute challenge for the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in editing plant genomes is that the system has a low efficiency in producing the desired modifications. Therefore, ...

Summary Synthetic carbon fixation pathways can allow plants to produce more biomass using the same amount of energy from sunlight. Novel carbon fixation cycles discovered at The Weizmann Institute hold potential to greatly increase the capacity of organisms to convert atmospheric carbon into ...

Summary A growing global population requires a greater food supply. The agriculture industry and biotechnology sector are trying to overcome the challenge and improve crop efficiency by increasing food production in the same or smaller farming areas, as well as dealing with the threats imposed by ...

Summary As the world’s population grows, and climate changes, there is a strong need for breeding hardier crops in a precise fashion. The traditional method of introducing new traits to a plant via traditional breeding methods is a slow and stochastic process, which can require growing a large ...