The Woman Who Is Increasing Crop Yields in Sub Saharan Africa with Genomics

Laura Boykin | Cassava Virus Action Project The whitefly is a deadly pest that destroys close to half the total yields in Africa. Take the cassava plant for example, a staple crop that 800 million people rely on for their daily calories. The whitefly transmits diseases that kill the cassava, like cassava mosaic disease, and cassava brown streak disease.    This is what we call on the Luminexus Podcast a “non obvious problem.” The problem of pests destroying the majority of cassava plants leaves millions of farmers with low yields to sell, no food to put away for the winter, contributing to an endless poverty loop.   Today we talk with Dr.Laura Boykin, whose research and work is about solving this problem. She has spent her life studying the evolution of whiteflies and the viruses they transmit, and she has mapped the genome of the cassava whitefly to better understand how it works.   Now, Laura is the founder of the Cassava Virus Action Project, where she works with small scale farmers in Sub Saharan Africa to teach them how to use genomic sequencing devices to catch infestations of the whitefly early on. In this conversation, we talk about the problem of the whitefly in Sub Saharan Africa, intergenerational poverty that stems from agriculture, and Laura’s research with genomic sequencing devices to give farmers the tools to detect and stop infestations of the whitefly.