Plant Biologists Win VinFuture Prize for Developing Self-Cloning Crops
The Global Impact of Basic Research
Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences, and Imtiyaz Khanday, an assistant professor of plant sciences, travelled to Hanoi, Vietnam to receive the prize at a special VinFuture Foundation ceremony Dec. 5.
The team’s prize-winning innovation emerged from basic research supported by federal grants, highlighting how scientific discoveries — and the impactful applications they enable — are often serendipitous.
“When we started out, we weren't even working on this problem,” said Sundaresan. “We were just trying to understand how plants make embryos.”
Khanday discovered BBM1’s role in triggering embryo activation while working as a postdoctoral fellow in Sundaresan’s lab. At around the same time, Raphael Mercier from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany and Emmanuel Guiderdoni and Delphine Mieulet from CIRAD (French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development) in Montpellier, France, figured out a way to prevent meiosis in rice. When the two groups joined forces, synthetic apomixis was born.