Designing the future of food
The University of Georgia is developing a center of excellence in crop design within the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, led by plant geneticist Scott Jackson. The initiative focuses on applying genomic tools, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology to engineer crops for future agricultural and industrial needs. Beyond improving standard disease resistance and yield, researchers aim to engineer plants (like corn) to produce useful precursors for bioplastics and pharmaceuticals.
UGA is actively recruiting a specialized cohort of faculty members—spanning computational modeling, machine learning, and plant synthetic biology—to build this program.
How UGA’s Scott Jackson is reimagining crops with synthetic biology
Jackson’s work links plant DNA sequences to their functions to improve the productivity and sustainability of vital economic crops. In his new role, he will use advanced modeling to explore the role of interacting genes in agricultural systems, working from DNA to molecules to entire production systems.
Stories from Field Report
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