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Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Smallholder farmers in East Africa are extremely resilient but they live on the edge of poverty. Most are women who, with babies on their backs, rely on making a living from one acre plots of cassava, beans and other staple foods.


When the rains fall and crops thrive, children can be fed and sent to school, but, like farmers everywhere, lives are governed by weather and by invasive pests and viruses that can destroy a staple crop.


In Africa – and across the world – one such pest is the silverleaf whitefly Bemisia tabaci which transmits devastating viruses. Whitefly management with pesticides and biological controls is problematic because it is difficult for farmers to distinguish between harmless species and those that rob a family of food to eat and take to market.


UWA computational biologist Laura Boykin began her battle to save a crop on which a billion people depend as a postdoctoral researcher with the US Department of Agriculture. At the time it was thought there was only one species of the pest. “We now know there are at least 34 species across the world, including Australia, where the pest attacks plants grown by market gardeners,” says the UWA researcher.


Dr Boykin now works as part of an international collective of outstanding researchers who the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have deemed worthy of significant funding. And it was a Foundation member at an international symposium who heard Laura talk about her research and said: “We love what you’re doing. We need you to come and work with us.”


What she was doing was using the advanced and intensive computing power of WA’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre to crunch huge genetic data sets that will help her to genetically distinguish the harmful from the harmless whiteflies.


“This project is all about getting to know the enemy,” says Dr Boykin. “It will help develop invaluable diagnostic tests. This is a pest affecting agriculture on every continent, and the techniques we’re developing with the East African whitefly can be applied around the world.”


Support from the Gates Foundation has not been the only international accolade for the UWA Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She was recently named the only Australian TED Fellow for 2015, making her part of an elite cohort of 300 trailblazing researchers.


What brought the US-born researcher to UWA? “This University has world-class supercomputing facilities and access to next generation sequencing technologies and it’s a great university for training PhD students from Africa and beyond in supercomputing and advanced biotechnology,” says Dr Boykin.


For more information: lauraboykinresearch.com


Photo: Dr Laura Boykin with scientists Dr Donald Kachigamba and John Sserumaga in Uganda


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