Giles Oldroyd is finding out how plants can provide their own fertiliser with a little help from specialist microbes like fungi and bacteria.
All in Genetic engineering
Caroline Dean: Winter is coming
Caroline Dean has devoted her research career to understanding how plants sense and respond to the changing of the seasons.
Lisa Caproni: Inside the DNA factory
We discover how Touchlight’s method for making DNA could transform the production of nucleic acid vaccines.
Thomas Boothby: Surviving at the extremes of life
Prof. Thomas Boothby studies how tardigrades survive extreme conditions and how we can use these adaptations to improve human health, both on Earth and in space.
Gunes Taylor: Genome editing in plants, animals and humans.
Gunes Taylor discusses how CRISPR/Cas9 technology may be used in agriculture, livestock and human health.
Ruth Garde: Cut+Paste - Exploring the ethical issues around genome editing
Ruth Garde is the creative producer behind Cut+Paste a hands-on exhibition at the Francis Crick Institute that aims to explore the ethical issues around gene editing and gather the public’s views about how this technology should be used.
Robin Lovell-Badge: Who should decide what is allowed when it comes to genome editing?
Robin Lovell-Badge discusses why genome editing regulations and ethical approval decisions should not be left up to scientists alone.
Ulrike Bauer: killing on a knife edge
One group of carnivorous plants are the pitcher plants, and they’re usually found in warm, tropical habitats around the world. Dr Ulrike Bauer studies these plants at the University of Bristol to find out more about how they’re able to successfully trap insects so easily.
Tanya Renner: Creating carnivorous ketchup
We chat with Dr Tanya Renner from Pennsylvania State University who is interested not only in how these plants evolved but also whether we can add carnivorous genes into non carnivorous plants.
Tarang Mehta: super fish for fish suppers
Across the world, over 3 billion people, or nearly half the global population, rely on fish as a significant source of animal protein, and since 2012, more of our fish has come from aquaculture or fish farms rather than catching wild fish. Dr Tarang Mehta is a molecular evolution scientist at the Earlham Institute who has been looking at future-proofing one group of fishes in particular, tilapia, which is already a hugely important fish for people around the world.
Hannah Rees: giving wheat jet lag
We need to make wheat a more reliable and resilient crop in the face of our ever changing climate, and that’s where geneticists like Dr Hannah Rees from the Earlham Institute in Norwich come in. Kat Arney sits down with Hannah to find out how understanding the basic biology of wheat is helping us produce a more future-proof plant.
Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel: the genesis of The Genesis Machine
Kat Arney interviews authors Amy Webb, who spends her time digging into the technologies that are changing the world, and Andrew Hessel, a geneticist who comes from the frontiers of genomic science, about their new book The Genesis Machine.
When it comes to advances in genetics tech, what’s actually possible, versus scaremongering science fiction? What’s coming fast down the pipeline that we need to know and think about? And how - and who - decides how this stuff should be regulated?
Putin's poo tin and other excrement espionage
The Russian ruler is somewhat paranoid about his health, or more importantly, keeping it a private matter. So it shouldn’t come as much of a shock to hear that Putin is also fastidious about something else: his faeces. We hold our nose as we dive into the world of excrement espionage and why you might not want your droppings to drop into enemy hands…
Sarah McAnulty: the secret lives of squid
Squid biologist Dr Sarah McAnulty explains what squid are, how they evolved, and why they are so difficult to genetically modify.
Rohin Francis: one small step for a heart
Dr Sally Le Page chats with cardiologist Dr Rohin Francis, from the YouTube channel MedLife Crisis, about the groundbreaking operation this year transplanting a genetically modified pig heart into a human, and the ethics of such a procedure.
Angelika Schnieke: making pigs more human
Dr Kat Arney chats with Professor Angelika Schnieke from the Technical University of Munich about how we create genetically modified pigs suitable for producing organ transplants for humans, and how we can avoid getting more than we bargained for from pigs.
The monkey in the mirror
Dr Kat Arney is looking at the monkey in the mirror, investigating how flipped genetic switches and long-dead viruses make all the difference between our human faces and those of our closest primate relatives.
Doug Williams: Taming the toxicity of cancer drugs
By targeting drugs directly to tumours, exosome therapies can reduce side effects from cancer treatment
Davide Zocco: From Petri dish to patients
Exosomes are exciting treatments of the future - but how are they made?
Rossella Crescitelli: What are exosomes and what can they do?
Once thought to be little more than ‘dust’, exosomes are tiny biological mailbags that travel around the body.