This week’s Talking Biotech guest is Dr. Jan Kreuze, a plant virologist at the Center for Potato Improvement (CIP) in Lima, Peru. He is working on developing disease-resistant sweet potatoes that can fend off what he calls “the HIV of sweet potatoes.” His team was able to identify a protein that interferes with the sweet potatoes’ defense mechanism. The podcast concludes with a discussion of the sweet potato’s natural horizontal gene transfer that could be the basis of its domestication.
Dr. Kreuze’s PNAS paper is here.
Follow Dr. Jan Kreuze on Twitter @JanKreuze
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