Food Security

The recent REN Leaders Forum served as a platform to facilitate greater united coordination to help increase the impact of the technologies and capabilities NRENs provide for enabling of research in APAC countries.

Scientists in Kenya and Australia collaborate on a research project to diagnose viruses that infect cassava, and sequencing whole cassava virus genomes in order to help eradicate infection.

Researchers from across Europe are hard at work developing a robot that autonomously roams a greenhouse, “eye-balling” sweet peppers to check if they have reached optimal ripeness, and then plucks them off the plant and places them in a vat – all automatically.

Broadband helps farmers and students in California’s Central Valley use technology and develop skills to improve the agriculture economy.

The Amazon is the largest and best-known center of biodiversity on the planet, but its forests are being lost at unsustainably high rates. Ongoing research in the Ecuadorian Amazon since the mid-1990s has resulted in concrete environmental benefits for the region and is now supported by a new connection between Ecuador and the United States.

The University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and SURF are collaborating on a campus network infrastructure optimized for sending research data. The aim is to create a blueprint for an architecture to help researchers collaborate on data-intensive research. The first use case is focusing on crop genome data.

"With the world's population estimated to reach 9.6 billion by 2050, making staple foods - wheat, grains and rice - higher yielding, more resilient to climate variability and more nutritious is vital. We can’t delay. Collaboration on a global scale is needed to produce the bulk of the food in the world, or there’ll be problems," said researcher Professor Barry Pogson.

“Without Science DMZ, our laboratories would be isolated islands,” says Ana Benko-Iseppon, a Brazilian researcher working on the global project to develop more environmentally adapted cultivated forms of the black-eyed bean.

To meet world population demands for food it has been estimated that the production of rice, the world’s most important staple food, must increase by 24% by 2050. As well as the challenges involved in growing more rice on less land and water, farmers need new rice varieties adapted to changing climatic conditions.

Faster access to genomics data aids researchers collaborating to find better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent cancer, as well those working to develop new plant varieties resistant to pests, floods and drought.

Thanks to the Mylims platform, scientists around the world are able to process and manipulate data, interpret results and compare them with spectra obtained by other users and those stored in databases, thus accelerating the understanding of compounds. Mylims has already led to breakthroughs in the diagnosis of illnesses, such as leukaemia, and has become a valuable tool for food chemists to detect fraudulent coffee.