Contact with Agriculture Industry

Steven traveled to Food & Farm Care's headquarters in Guelph to propose the CRISPR-defense for plants iGEM project to various heads of agricultural community groups. Their interest was excellent, but their worry about the nature of the virus-resistance as coming from bacteria would raise too many anti-GMO flags amongst the greater community and decrease sales of food-product overall. Steven was given the names and emails of many other groups to contact, including a plant-virus specialist from London's plant research facility. We followed up by contacting that facility and found that we'd be allowed to use their facilities to test our CRISPR-armed plant against the CAMV virus once our project was finished. I also discovered that strawberry farmers in Ontario have been plagued by a virus which we may be able to target with further development.