BIO

Anne Villacastin (she/her) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint BioEnergy Institute of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). She joined LBNL in 2022 and has since been dedicated to discovering optimized transformation methods for the sorghum cereal crop, a promising source of renewable biofuels and bioproducts. Prior to this, she was awarded her PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2022. Her doctoral research focused on studying the roles of drought-related genes in rice through the application of a multiplex CRISPR triple-gene knockout system.

ABSTRACT

Sorghum is a versatile cereal crop that provides food and fodder; and it produces an abundant biomass that has the potential to be converted into renewable biofuel. However, the current process of converting this biomass into biofuel is not highly efficient. To address this issue, our research aims to utilize optimized genetic transformation techniques for sorghum, with the aim of enhancing its potential as a bioenergy crop.