[Agvisors] FW: Plant Science Undergraduate Club Meeting this Friday 5-6pm in Marley 230

[Rodriguez Lorta, Nancy G - (nancyr)]

Distribute to students as you deem appropriate. Thanks!

Join the School of Plant Sciences Undergraduate Club
this Friday for free food and a stimulating presentation from Dr. Ken Felmann on biotechnology.
Meet in 230 Marley from 5-6pm.
A full description is found below and a promotional flyer is attached that can be posted or circulated through your listservs.
Hope to see you there!
Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living things in engineering, technology and medicine to modify living organisms to suit human purposes. It encompasses a wide ranging set of technologies from artificial insemination to xenotransplantation with many rapidly developing technologies in between including synthetic biology, biofuel production, cloning, designer babies, antibiotic and vaccine development, nanotechnology, omics, etc. Plant biotechnology, particularly the genetic engineering of herbicide and insect tolerance into crop plants, will be the focus of our discussion.
Ken Feldmann has been doing modern plant biotechnology for the past 30 years. After completing a PhD in Genetics at The Ohio State University he took a postdoctoral fellowship at Zoecon Research Corporation in Palo Alto, CA where he developed a procedure to simultaneously knock-out and tag genes in Arabidopsis. As a senior scientist at E.I. DuPont in the late 80s, he expanded on the production of knock-out mutants in this model plant species and began to screen for genes that would be useful to genetically engineer into crop plants. In 1990, he moved to the University of Arizona where he pursued research on the brassinosteroid and epicuticular wax biosynthetic pathways. Most of the genes that were isolated during this time were patented and have been licensed to a company for use in crop plants. In 1997, he moved to the Los Angeles area to help start up a new Ag biotech company, Ceres. During this time, he led a $135M dollar contract with Monsanto to discover genes that would be useful for Monsanto to genetically engineer into corn and soybeans. Upon returning the University of Arizona in 2009, he has continued to do research in the area of functional genomics and to teach biotechnology to both science and non-science majors.
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