Research on understanding, inducing and overcoming stress tolerances, developing herbicide resistant crops, especially for the control of parasitic weeds in Africa and around the Mediterranean.
There is a need to keep the more environmentally friendly, cost-effective herbicides in use.
Many crops have closely related weeds with which they can hybridize. Some which are actually feral forms of the crops or weedy forms of crop progenitors. In many cases it would be detrimental to have crop genes transfer from the crop to the weed.
Eighty percent of food and animal feed come from four crops, which is quite dangerous to food security. Many other crops had been more widely cultivated, but lacked sufficient genetic diversity to keep up with the "big four", i.e. reached a genetic glass ceiling. The missing diversity was analyzed for a group of representative crops, and transgenic solutions were ascertained that would begin to assist in enhancing crop diversity.
Transgenic biosafety issues have been dealt with in research and publications as well as participating as a lecturer in transgenic biosafety courses and symposia around the world. Food security, especially in Africa, has been dealt with in research, lectures, and scientific and general publications, as well as participation in UNIDO, World Bank, and US National Research Council studies and panels dealing with these issues.
