Stronger Plants, Stronger Science, and Stronger Communication
This summer will be my 4th year growing corn for my research. Every year, I’ve seen some crazy things in the transgenic and non-transgenic fields alike. For example: On the left is “tassel ear”, where silks and kernels (female, seed producing plant parts) appear on the tassel (male, pollen producing plant parts), where they are…
When I was in grad school, there was a lab in our department that studied intestinal parasitic roundworms. Although this wasn’t related to what I was doing in any way—everyone who has been to grad school will know that you attend the department seminars for the donuts and/or pizza no matter what the topic is. …
Hi everyone, Frank N. Foode™ here. Over the weekend, I went to the MOSES organic farming conference in La Crosse Wisconsin. It was right on my way across the country so it wasn’t much of a detour for me. This conference brought farmers, consumers, and seeds from all over the Midwest to attend some workshops…
Do you know the consequences of calling some food “organic” and others not organic?
We’ve all heard about the tragic suicides of farmers in India, and we’ve all seen blame placed on Bt cotton. Vandana Shiva has been a leading finger pointer, saying that farmer suicides are due to genetically engineered crops (specifically, due to Monsanto), as in the April 2009 post From Seeds of Suicide to Seeds of…
Written by Cody Cobb As a molecular biologist, most of my work is done on a bench at or below room temperature. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to a research field because I have more than two fingers. I’ve never taken a course in ecology, and I’ve rarely…
Read More “Escape! Crop-Specific Gene Flow to Wild Relatives” »
The wasps in the video below are most likely from the family Braconidae. These wasps make their living as parasitoids, growing within other animals and eventually eating them from the inside out. Their life starts as an egg which is laid in the caterpillar by a female. This egg may divide into many, many larvae…
Visitors to Biofortified may notice some seemingly conflicting messages in our posts. The authors of this blog are generally proponents* of biotechnology. We are also often proponents of low-input high-genetic diversity farming, and proponents of local or regional food systems. How can that be? Well, we don’t think these ideas are conflicting at all. We…
My name is Joe and I’m going to be an occasional guest blogger here at Biofortified. The area I write about is going to be a bit different than most of the other writers on this website. Instead of writing about genetically modified plants, I’m going to spend a large portion of my time writing…
Another change brought about by the Changemakers contest is that I now have a video editing program suitable to start coming out with videos that we have been collecting. Behold, I give you Marty Sachs and Candy Gardener talking about the stocks of maize seeds that they manage! This footage was taken at the 51st…