Page 6 - Impact - Fall 2020

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What do oak wilt, zebra mussels and COVID-19 have in common?
When it comes to these unwelcome invaders, none can hide for long from Abdennour Abbas, Ph.D., and his team at Abbas Research Labs.
In recent years, the associate professor in the Department
of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering has spearheaded research to quickly extract DNA to find the fungal agent in infected oak trees before they were diagnosed with oak wilt, a disease fatal to the trees. He and his team developed a similar procedure that tests lake water for DNA signatures in zebra mussels.
Fast-forward to the pandemic of 2020. The U of M asked
the academic community to donate kits to help with COVID-19 diagnostics and alleviate supply chain problems. Abbas’s team got straight to work. Using the research on oak wilt and zebra mussels, they developed a new RNA extraction kit for COVID-19 diagnostics in under two months.
In June, the U of M Medical School’s COVID-19 Diagnostic Lab produced a preliminary study comparing the Abbas Lab kits to the widely used kits of a commercial company on real patient samples. The findings showed that the Abbas Lab kits perform better, and even detected a positive patient sample that the commercial kit missed. This
is especially important because Abbas and
his team make everything in their lab from
raw materials — eliminating supply chain issues — at a fraction of the cost of producing commercial kits.
GEMS PARTNERS WITH ORGANIZATIONS TO GROW THE PLATFORM AND ITS POTENTIAL.
Enabling a Data Revolution in
Malawian Agriculture
Across the agricultural landscape, a myriad of data is
being collected 24/7 by satellites in the sky, sensors on the ground, farm machinery and people. From weather patterns to soil conditions to crop health, data is being amassed in abundance by public and private organizations.
But what do we do with all that disparate agricultural data? How do we make it useful so we can benefit people and the environment?
There’s a super sleuth unlocking the promises of big data right now — GEMS, an international agroinformatics initiative jointly led by CFANS and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. GEMS (Genetics x Environment x Management x Socioeconomics), is the first and only system designed to
support and integrate this kind of spatially and temporally distributed data in a single platform.
In 2019, GEMS, Land O’Lakes Venture37, Agri-Sciences Faculty at Stellenbosch University and The Malawi University of Science and Technology established the Centre for Agricultural Transformation (CAT). The CAT’s vision is to transform Malawian agriculture through demand-driven technologies, partnerships and interventions linking farmers to domestic, regional and international food and agriculture markets. A current project is helping Malawian smallholder farmers diversify their incomes, build resilience and ease their reliance on the declining tobacco sector, which today generates much of Malawi’s foreign exchange earnings.
CAT WILL FORGE PATHWAYS THAT FOSTER DIVERSIFIED AND RESILIENT SMALLHOLDER FARMERS.
RESEARCHER AKLI ZAROURI AT WORK IN ABBAS LABS.
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PHOTO: LAND O'LAKES VENTURE37