Agtech to the rescue in a pandemic: adapting plant labs for human testing

Just as redeploying a fleet of small British fishing boats helped during the Battle of Dunkirk, marshalling the research equipment and expertise of the many agtech labs around the world could help combat pandemics, say the authors of a just-published article in Nature Biotechnology. Sophisticated agtech labs and equipment used for crop and animal breeding, seed testing, and monitoring of plant and animal diseases could easily be adapted for diagnostic testing and tracing in a human pandemic or epidemic, the article states.