Cutting Edge Seminar - Oliver J. Ratcliffe: Novel technology to enhance tomorrow's harvest

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Date:
Monday, August 26, 2013 10:00
Categories:
Seminar

Cutting Edge Seminar
Olivier J. Ratcliffe
Mendel Biotechnology, Inc., Hayward, California, USA

"Novel technology to enhance tomorrow's harvest"


Place: CHANGE of ROOM!
KB3A9 "Lilla hörsalen", KBC

Host: Totte Niittylä

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Biography: Oliver is Senior Vice President of R&D at Mendel Biotechnology, Inc., a privately-held plant biotechnology company based in the San Francisco Bay Area (http://www.mendelbio.com/index.php). Oliver joined Mendel in 1999 and fulfilled a number of technical roles prior to being appointed as head of research in December 2005. He is a named inventor on more than 40 issued patents and published patent applications and has authored a range of scientific papers on topics including developmental biology, the control of flowering, and the regulation of environmental stress responses in plants. Oliver received a B.A. in Natural Sciences (Part II Genetics) from Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the John Innes Centre at the University of East Anglia in the UK. Oliver also holds an MBA from the Judge Business School at Cambridge University.

Seminar outline. Human demands on the planet's agricultural production systems create a long-term sustained need for new technology to improve crop productivity. Oliver will discuss the approaches that Mendel Biotechnology has taken in pursuit of this goal over the past 15 years. The talk will open with an overview of how the company, starting with an early focus on biotechnology traits for yield and stress tolerance based on transcription factors, has developed a leading knowledge base of the plant gene regulatory networks (PGRNs) that control important aspects of crop productivity. He will then explain how this understanding of transcriptional networks is being leveraged to develop unique tools that enable the discovery and development of new chemical and biological products that can be applied to boost multiple aspects of plant performance. Such products represent a brand-new emergent segment within the agrochemical industry, which offers both significant growth potential as well as the opportunity to markedly improve the productivity of a broad spectrum of crops.