ag bio

Guests:

Eric Rey, CEO, Arcadia Biosciences

Listen (6:46) Nitrogen Use Efficiency

Listen (6:38) Where are you finding commercial success?

Listen (2:14) Tilling - a non transgenic platform

Listen (5:43) Best PR comes from being open and honest

Listen (2:05) Understanding GM backlash

Listen (6:13) Food labeling

Arcadia Biosciences is a company in Davis, California that has been developing GM (genetically modified) plants for farmers for over ten years. Their lead product, NUE or nitrogen use efficiency, has been licensed out to agricultural partners around the world. Arcadia CEO, Eric Rey, joins us to explain where the company has found success in those ten years. He discusses Arcadia's science, their business model, and insists the best strategy for overcoming the challenge of GM backlash is in being "as open and honest as possible."

Some of the strongest resistance to genetically modifying crops comes from Eric's home turf, Berkeley, California, which he's quick to remind us is "not the bastion of conservative thinking." Eric finds it ironic that those who are willing to consider the facts about climate change have a hard time doing the same about the GM products his company is producing. Concluding the interview, Eric takes on the recent political push to require labeling for GM foods.

Podcast brought to you by: Chempetitive Group - "We love science. We love marketing. We love the idea of combining the two to make great things happen for your marketing communications."

Podcast brought to you by: Ingenuity Variant Analysis - Identify causal variants from human sequencing data in just hours.

Guests:

Lasse Goerlitz, VP of Communications, CLC Bio
Bio and Contact Info

Listen (5:16) Highest demand coming from agro

Listen (3:06) What is holding back the adoption of genomic medicine?

Listen (4:03) A commercial platform with plug-ins

Listen (3:37) Open source vs commercial software

Listen (4:40) The all-in-one guys

Listen (5:56) Genomics in Europe

The repeating trend from industry to industry is for software to go from fragmented, custom applications toward larger dominant platforms. It's still the early days for bioinformatics, and just who the dominant platforms of the future will be remain unknown. Will they be open source, public platforms or commercial platforms?

CLC Bio, a bioinformatics company has been working on the solution for eight years now and hopes that their platform which works with many different plug-ins will become number one for biologists around the world. In today's show, CLC's VP of Communications, Lasse Goerlitz, talks about their platform and trends in genomics. Currently their heaviest users are in ag bio, but the demand from the clinic is rising. We conclude with a discussion of differences between Europe and the US in the genomics space.

Podcast Sponsor: IDT- gBlocks(TM) Gene Fragments Synthetic biology for any lab

Guest:

Sean Myles, PhD, Ass. Professor, Nova Scotia Agricultural College Bio and Contact Info

Listen (2:29) Honey crisp apple a mistake

Listen (6:33) Genetics and crop breeding

Listen (3:26) Pesticides or GMOs?

Listen (6:12) Cultivated grapes not having enough sex

Listen (8:03) A future with more varietals to choose from

Listen (3:32) Especially inspired by the phenotype of the wine grape

Sean Myles is interested in the sex life of wine grapes and apples. At the Nova Scotia Agricultural College he is focusing on using genetic data to detect and dissect the effects of domestication and breeding on crops. Sean talks about how genetics is changing the future of wine making. While he is not genetically altering plants himself, he discusses the tradeoff between pesticides and GMOs. Sean received his PhD in Genetics from the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany. His undergraduate was in English Literature. His wife is a winemaker in Nova Scotia.

Podcast Sponsor: Singulex- Watch our cardiovascular monitoring programs explained on YouTube

Guests:

Dr. Dave Smoller, CSO, Sigma Life Science Bio and Contact Info

Dr. Supriya Shivakumar, Global Marketing Manager, Sigma Life Science Bio and Contact Info

Listen (9:42) ZFN technology and products

Listen (2:09) "A game changer"

Listen (3:42) Rats better than mice for studying neural diseases

Listen (2:12) Improvement in products

Listen (3:00) Why buy when researchers can make their own?

Listen (6:24) Revival of gene therapy?

Listen (5:59) Recent study on hemophilia

Listen (7:35) Applications in AgBio

Listen (7:55) If we'd only had ZFNs back when . . .

(ZFNs) or Zinc finger nucleases are a class of engineered DNA-binding proteins that enable targeted editing of the genome. They do this by creating double-strand breaks in DNA at virtually any specific location. Through homologous and non-homologous recombination, the technology can generate precisely targeted genomic edits including gene deletions (Knockouts), integrations, or modifications. The technology holds great promise for treating human disease such as hemophilia and sickle cell anemia and may revive gene therapy. In addition the ZFNs are offering new possibilities in plant and animal research. Developed first by Sangamo Biosciences, the technology has been licensed to Sigma Life Science which they offer as their CompoZr ZFN technology.

Here to talk to us about this exciting technology and the promise of its many applications is Dr. Dave Smoller, CSO at Sigma and Supriya Shivakumar, global marketing manager for functional Genomics at Sigma. Dave was formerly president of the Research Biotech Business Unit at Sigma. Before that he founded two companies which were acquired, ProteoPlex, focused on functional genomics and Genome Systems, which offered access to Human Genome project related technologies. Supriya did graduate studies in Harold Varmus’ lab at UC San Francisco, where she used reverse genetics approaches to study oncogenes and their normal biological role in C. elegans.