Local Agriculture Outreach and CaMV Testing Facility

Steven traveled to Food & Farm Care's headquarters in Guelph, Ontario to propose the CRISPR-plant-defense portion of the iGEM 2015 project to various heads of agricultural community groups including Josh Cowan from Grain Farmers of Ontario, Michael Celetti from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and Josh Kelly from the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association. They were excited by the idea we had to propose, but their worry about the nature of the virus-resistance as coming from bacterial DNA was heavily cited as something that would raise too many anti-GMO flags amongst the greater community. Steven was given the names and emails of many other Ontario groups to contact including the plant-virus specialist from London's Agriculture Canada plant research facility, Aming Wang. We followed up with Aming 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. As a potential local application of the project idea, it was mentioned that strawberry farmers in Ontario have been plagued by a virus with real economic implications.