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Moderated conference on Genomics in Food and Agriculture

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Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:07:51 +0100
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This is Denis Murphy again, from the University of Glamorgan, UK.

I greatly appreciate all the comments from colleagues throughout the world and applaud the opportunity provided by John Ruane and the team at FAO for us to communicate together in this way.

I especially welcome the comments of Adrian Dubock (Message 43) as somebody who has worked with a major biotech company (Syngenta) and currently works on the at-times controversial golden rice project. It is now 14 years since I heard Ingo Potrykus announce the successful production of golden rice at a conference in London and the variety has still to become a reality on the ground in Asia, although it now seems close to release at last. I thoroughly agree with Adrian and others in this conference that there are older technologies that still have immense potential especially for developing country crops. I still recall when as a brash young molecular biologist who was promoting 'designer crops' I was told off by breeders who told me that simplistic single gene manipulations have very limited scope in real world agriculture. Over 25 years later I think I was definitely too optimistic - but maybe they were also a little too pessimistic. For sure, techniques like quantitative genetics and pedigree breeding underpin the success of modern agriculture and these and even simpler basic methods have yet to be used systematically in many developing country crops. But we should keep focusing on the future potential of the new genomic technologies.

One suggestion that emerges from this e-mail conference is to establish some sort of actively moderated information exchange platform where there could be informal exchange of experiences, data, knowledge, and expertise on genomics and other aspects of breeding for the global community.

What would the site do? Well for a start it could be used to upload papers, reports, data, and tools such as algorithms - possibly in a similar way to sites like academia.edu where researchers can not only upload papers etc but can also ask for advice on technical problems. The site could help practitioners and policymakers stay in touch with researchers in a truly global setting. As an advisor to several official bodies in the European Union, I have been struck that even here there are many misunderstandings about genomics especially between policymakers and researchers and I am sure the same is true more globally. The site could also serve as a useful resource more generally - for example for science journalists - as long as it was properly moderated and kept as a trustworthy repository of reliable information and informed discussion. The site would need a long term host and one obvious candidate is FAO if they were willing to take it on .....

I'm not sure about the finer details of this proposal yet and it may be completely unrealistic so I would welcome feedback (if only to say it is a crazy idea) during the last few days of this conference.

Professor Denis J Murphy, 
University of Glamorgan, CF37 4AT, 
United Kingdom 
email: dmurphy2 (at) glam.ac.uk
website: http://staff.glam.ac.uk/users/184 
Google Scholar outputs: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=GQc6wQsu-BkC

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information on this FAO Biotechnology Forum, see http://www.fao.org/biotech/biotech-forum/
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