The story and the memes and the jokes of Greta Thunberg are all around the internet. The Climate change issue is being merely a joke and the minor greta is being trashed by the adults of the internet. However it is too obvious that the climate is changing constantly, but yeah not in the favor of the human race.
The climate change may not be the only cause for the declining productivity and the yeild of the crops but it surely is one of the many factors affecting the crop production. In the one hand, The Climate change has resulted in unexpected change in the normal climatic factors such as temperature and precepitation etc directly affecting the almost every biochemical and physiological processes of a plant, in the other hand it has made environment favorable for the insects, pests and viruses that has taken the form of epidemic to produce crops for the farmers all over the world.
When The farmers who feed the whole world are sleeping hungry, while on the other hand the science and the technologies are getting more uninclusive and wayy out of the reach from the farmers of the hooks and corners of the africa and the asia. The farmers are compelled to live in the poverty all their life constantly having to worry about what to ingest to get the tummy filled. The suicide rate of the farmers in India is constantly increasing and the news of the suicide are emerging more frequently.
Admist all these disappointments, Dr. Laura Boykin has come out as a sparkle of hope for some of the farmers in Saharian Africa by making the DNA technology Accessible inorder to treat the virus in their staple crop CAVASSA.
Cassava is a plant whose leaves and roots feed 800 million people globally. And 500 million in East Africa. So that’s nearly a billion people relying on this plant for their daily calories. If a small-scale family farmer has enough cassava, she can feed her family and she can sell it at the market for important things like school fees, medical expenses and savings.
But cassava is under attack in Africa. Whiteflies and viruses are devastating cassava. Several species of Whiteflies feed on the leaves of over 600 plants and transmit hundreds of plant viruses that cause cassava brown streak disease and cassava mosaic disease. This completely kills the plant.
The situation on the ground was shocking. The whiteflies had destroyed the leaves that were eaten for protein, and the viruses have destroyed the roots that were being eaten for starch.Had they known about the pests and the pathogen resistant species of the plant, the sufferings they got throughout the whole planting season could have been prevented.
However, it’s not about the non-existence of the technology we all needed,but the problem lies on the distribution of the knowledge and the technologies..The older genomic technologies that have been required to uncover the complexities in these pests and pathogens were not made for sub-Saharan Africa. They cost upwards of a million dollars and require constant power and specialized human capacity. These machines are few and far between on the continent, which is leaving many scientists battling on the front lines no choice but to send the samples overseas. And when sending the samples overseas, samples degrade and costed a lot of money and was time consuming by when it’s too late. The crop been already gone and resulting poverty and hunger.
But she knew she could fix this. In 2017, she heard of this handheld, portable DNA sequencer called an Oxford Nanopore MinION That was being used in West Africa to fight Ebola. So she thought: Why couldn’t they use this in East Africa to help farmers? At the time, the technology was very new, and many doubted if her team could replicate this on the farm. But they did it. They took the entire high-tech molecular lab to the farmers of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, and called it Tree Lab. So what they did was they gave themshelves a team name calling ‘The Cavassa Virus Action Project.
They made a website,and gathered support from the genomics and computing communities, and went away to the farmers. All of the molecular and computational requirements needed to diagnose sick plants is there. (which she showed in the Ted Talk here as well)
The Closer to the problem, and closer to the farmer, the quicker They could tell what was wrong with the plant and also give the solution.And the solution is, burning the field and plant varieties that are resistant to the pests and pathogens in the field. So the first thing they did was doing a DNA extraction. And using the machine called a PDQeX, which stands for “Pretty Damn Quick Extraction.”;which was given by her really cool friend Joe. One of the biggest challenges in doing a DNA extraction is it usually requires very expensive equipment, and takes hours. But with the machine they were able to do it in 20 minutes, and at a fraction of the cost. And also runs off just of a motorcycle battery.
From there, the DNA extraction was taken and prepared into a library, getting it ready to load on to the portable, handheld genomic sequencer, and then plugging this into a mini supercomputer, which is called a MinIT. And both of these things were plugged into a portable battery pack. So They were able to eliminate the requirements of main power and internet, which are two very limiting factors on a small-scale family farm. All that gluing of dead plants, and all that measuring, and all that computing finally came in handy in a real-world, real-time way. She was able to make customized databases and they were able give the farmers results in three hours versus six months.
The farmers were overjoyed. The Impact was real. Nine months after the Tree Lab, Asha, a farmer, went from having zero tons per hectare to 40 tons per hectare.
“So how do we scale Tree Lab?”, She says “The thing is, farmers are scaled already in Africa. These women work in farmer groups, so helping Asha actually helped 3,000 people in her village, because she shared the results and also the solution.”.
She further added, “I remember every single farmer I’ve ever met. Their pain and their joy is engraved in my memories. Our science is for them. Tree Lab is our best attempt to help them become more food secure. I never dream’t that the best science I would ever do in my life would be on that blanket in East Africa, with the highest-tech genomic gadgets. But our team did dream that we could give farmers answers in three hours versus six months, and then we did it. Because that’s the power of diversity and inclusion in science.”
(This article was based on a Ted-talk she had given recently. You can view it here.)
Agro.science.blog 