Just as redeploying a fleet of small British fishing boats helped during the Battle of Dunkirk, marshalling the research equipment and expertise of the many agtech labs around the world could help combat pandemics, say the authors of a just-published article in Nature Biotechnology.
Just as redeploying a fleet of small British fishing boats helped during the Battle of Dunkirk, marshalling the research equipment and expertise of the many agtech labs around the world could help combat pandemics, say the authors of a just-published article in Nature Biotechnology.
Sophisticated agtech labs and equipment used for crop and animal breeding, seed testing, and monitoring of plant and animal diseases could easily be adapted for diagnostic testing and tracing in a human pandemic or epidemic, the article states.
“If there is anything this current pandemic has shown us, it is that we need to mobilize efforts on a large scale to ramp up diagnostics,” said lead author Steven Webb, chief executive officer of the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask).
“We must mobilize ‘large ships’ to fight pandemics by exploiting and adapting the screening capacity of high-throughput plant breeding laboratories which can rapidly analyze hundreds of thousands of samples.”
Read more at University of Saskatchewan
Image: GIFS' liquid handling robot used to automate the dispensing of specific amounts of liquids to containers in the lab. (Credit: Pierre-Luc Pradier)
