Next Colloquium: Tuesday, 2/11
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Steve Evans, Ph.D., Dow AgroSciences Fellow (Retired) and Founder of Re-Knowvate, LLC
Website: re-knowvate.com| Email
Recent technology advances have re-ignited interests in broadly deploying engineered organisms in open environmental releases. Have learnings from the past been incorporated into current development and discourse, or are we setting up simply to re-plow the same ground? Read more >
Speaker Bio
Steven L. Evans spent 30 years bringing biotechnology products to the field in small and large companies. His research focused on biochemistry and recombinant protein expression in ag and environmental biotech. At Mycogen and Dow AgroSciences he developed native and recombinant biopesticides, natural products, and plant genome editing technology. Steve retired as a Fellow from Dow AgroSciences (now Corteva Agriscience) and founded Re-Knowvate LLC. Steve has been active in public-private partnerships (NSF SynBERC and the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC)) as well as serving on the NAS Future Products of Biotechnology and the NAS Safeguarding the Bioeconomy studies. He received his BA (chemistry) and BS (microbiology) from the Univ. of Mississippi and a PhD in microbial physiology from the Univ. of Mississippi Medical School. He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and with the USDA in Peoria, IL.
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Synthetic biology and biodiversity conservation
Elizabeth Bennett, VP of Species Conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society, will join us remotely to share her work on the potential impacts (positive and negative) of synbio on species conservation Read more >
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Two papers on naturally occurring gene drives in red flour beetles
There has been an upsurge of research on synthetic gene drives and their potential for addressing health, agriculture and conservation problems. However, no organisms with synthetic gene drives have been released into the environment so predictions of their performance beyond the lab has been based on mathematical models. In two recent papers, Dr. Sarah Cash and colleagues report on work conducted at NC State to examine the spread of two naturally occuring gene drives. The geographic range of one of the gene drives has increased over time, but for both, the distribution is patchy. The analysis indicates that the limitation on the spread is not due to resistance to the drive. Instead, restricted individual movement appears to impede the spread. This empirical data suggests that in some cases synthetic gene drives may spread more slowly than initially predicted.
Sarah A. Cash, Michael A. Robert, Marce D. Lorenzen, and Fred Gould. Ecol Evol,2020; 10: 863– 874. doi: 10.1002/ece3.5946. Published: 19 December 2019. Download PDF
Sarah A. Cash, Marce D. Lorenzen, and Fred Gould. Ecol Evol, 2019; 9: 14407– 14416. doi: 10.1002/ece3.5876. Published: 27 November 2019. Download PDF
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Megan E. Serr, Rene X. Valdez, Kathleen S. Barnhill-Dilling, John Godwin, Todd Kuiken & Matthew Booker. Biological Invasions (2020) pp 1-14. Published: 02 January 2020.
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Dalton R. George, Todd Kuiken, and Jason A. Delborne. Proc. Royal Soc. B. Vol. 286, Issue 1917. Published: 18 December 2019.
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Barnes, J., Pitts, E., Barnhill-Dilling, S., & Delborne, J. In T. Pittinsky (Ed.), Science, Technology, and Society: New Perspectives and Directions (pp. 203-233). Cambridge University Press. Published: November 2019.
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Trump, B. D., Cummings, C. L., Kuzma, J. & Linkov, I. (2020). Springer, Cham. First online: 29 November 2019
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