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GDCB faculty in leadership roles in Crop Bioengineering Consortium (CBC)

Crop Bioengineering Consortium logoFunded by a Presidential Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research, The ISU Crop Bioengineering Consortium (CBC) formed to address the urgent challenge to provide sufficient food, feed, biofuels and biorenewable chemicals for the world’s burgeoning population through basic and applied research to enable the bioengineering of valuable traits in a variety of crops.  GDCB faculty with leadership roles in the CBC include Professors Martin Spalding, PI, and Bing Yang, Co-I.  Other members of GDCB are on the CBC Advisory Council – Professors Carolyn Lawrence and Erik Vollbrecht.  They join GDCB Professors Phil Becraft, Stephen Howell, Yanhai Yin and GDCB Scientist Dr. David Wright as CBC investigators.

There is an urgent and grand challenge to find more effective ways to provide sufficient food, feed, fiber, biofuels and biorenewable chemicals for the world’s burgeoning population and yield increases, which have succeeded historically, but fall short of today’s demand.  Together, members of the CBC work together to deploy innovative, transformative genome engineering technologies that identify, validate, and rapidly but precisely integrate strategically important traits and underlying genes into key crop plants. Importantly, the novel technologies employed can produce bioengineered crops that contain no transgenes and thus may face less stringent regulation than classic genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

To find out more about the CBC, visit their website.