See my profile for the overview, but at the moment I’m seeing if garlic will stop bacteria communicating with each other. Bacteria are like an army – if they communicate well and work as a team they can be devastating, if you take away their means to work together (take away the way they make, transmit or recieve a signal) they are much weaker.
I am working on an African food crop called Plantain, it’s like banana but needs to be cooked before it can be eaten. It’s a very important food in West Africa where it is fried or mashed like potato. One of the problems that plantains and bananas have is that they aren’t very good at protecting themselves against pests and diseases. I’m putting a gene from rice into the plantain plant that stops little worms called nematodes from eating their roots. The nematodes can cause the plantain plants to fall over so the farmers can’t get the fruit. Nematodes can cause half of the plantains and bananas that farmers produce to be lost. So they are a big problem.
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