The BiosearchTech Blog

Food security is a major global threat and traditional methods of plant and animal breeding will not be sufficient to increase production to the level needed to sustain the growing world population. Modern genomics-driven breeding, through analysis based on technologies such as next generation sequencing (NGS) and arrays, is revolutionizing agriculture and making genomic selection a viable approach throughout the industry. In this three series blog post find out how technology is changing global food security and what the newest tools bring to the table.

Diversity is the spice of life and is also key to breeding rice that delivers increased yields. Rice is a crucial staple food for about half a billion people in Asia, but it suffers from diseases that reduce yields, destroy harvests and put food security and livelihoods at risk. But there is hope - by tracking DNA markers of natural genetic variants through generations of crosses, breeders can identify better combinations that enrich crop vitality and resilience leading to more reliable and sustainable rice production.

While the science of pharmacogenomics has been around for years, its popularity is starting to pick up steam as precision medicine and how we treat individual patients becomes more and more common place in the medical world. Geneticists and doctors are fully embracing the fact that our individual genes make us all unique and that these genes hold clues to how each patient’s body will metabolise medications.

Imagine a time capsule the size of a shoebox that holds all the information currently on the internet that can be stored and accessed for hundreds and thousands of years ¹. Sound like a scene straight out of a science fiction novel set in the year 3000? It’s not. Scientists are already working on cracking the code – binary code that is. DNA, is analogous to the binary code on your computer, so why not treat it as such?

Ever wake up in the morning just feeling like a rock star, or maybe like Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin or Maurice Wilkins? You’re ready to just crush any task in front of you, discover something new and life changing. We get it. We’ve been there. And we love that we have products like Stellaris^® RNA FISH – which is an incredibly straight forward technique that makes detecting, localizing and quantifying individual RNA molecules pretty simple. It’s times like this when you’re feeling invincible in your crisp white lab coat that crushing blows like forgetting to add a positive control to your Custom Stellaris probe set can derail your science even before it starts. It makes us cringe just thinking about it!

Visiting PAG is exhilarating, energising and somewhat overwhelming. With over 3000 leading plant and animal genetics researchers, 150 workshops and 1100 posters it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.

To truly understand complex diseases such as cancer, scientists need access to tools that don’t just average data across millions of cells, but that can interrogate single cells to examine  gene expression and regulation in diseased cells. 

Ask any little girl what they want to be when they grow up and you may hear things like, princess, ballerina, pop star, or dolphin trainer. But scientist? You bet! More and more young girls are looking to science and technology with intrigue and excitement thanks to many brilliant women who are leading the charge and breaking ground in fields that have historically been dominated by men. At LGC, we are extremely lucky to be surrounded by smart, trailblazing, ambitious women who are striving to help make our world a better place each and every day. To celebrate Women’s History month, we sat down with application scientist Erin Steer, senior scientist Dusty Vyas and senior scientist Marcela Soruco to discuss what originally drew them to science and what inspires them today.

Stellaris® RNA FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization) is an RNA visualization method that allows simultaneous detection, localization, and quantification at the sub-cellular level in fixed samples using widefield or confocal fluorescence microscopy.

With the global population predicted to reach 9 billion people within the next 35 years, we will need to double the annual yield increases to avoid the impending food crisis. This challenge is exacerbated by unseasonal climate fluctuations that can destroy entire harvests – even in modern agricultural settings.

Rewind to last summer in the U.S., when southern-grown peaches are usually at their most delicious. But not last year - many U.S. farmers have faced a peach crisis. In South Carolina alone, as much as 90 percent of the crop had disappeared. In Georgia, often known as the Peach State, a similar story appeared.