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UC Berkeley undergrad receives grant to engineer disease-resistant soybean


Berkeley, California, USA
July 26, 2018

UC Berkeley’s Sponsored Projects for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) program provides funding to undergraduates to work in collaboration with esteemed scientists across campus. Yunru Peng, a rising senior and Microbial Biology major, received a SPUR grant of $2000 to spend the summer spearheading a genome engineering project as part of the IGI’s agricultural research.
 

Headshot of Yunru Peng
 

When applying for a SPUR grant, students can either join a faculty-initiated project or propose their own project. Yunru successfully applied to SPUR with her student-initiated project, “Enhancing soy’s resistance to the Asian soybean rust pathogen by site-specific gene insertion.” She will conduct her research under the mentorship of IGI Scientific Director of Agriculture Brian Staskawicz and postdoc Bastian Minkenberg.
 

Yunru Peng holding a soybean plant


Asian soybean rust is a common fungal infection that causes serious global yield loss. Yunru’s project aims to insert genes that increase resistance into a soy cultivar using CRISPR genome editing technology. This site-specific insertion promises a fast and precise way to create disease-resistant plants to feed the ever-growing world population.



More news from:
    . University of California, Berkeley
    . Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)


Website: http://www.berkeley.edu

Published: July 27, 2018

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