Lois Banta Discusses the Connection Between Plant Genetics and Sustainable Agriculture

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Feb. 10, 2012 – This year’s Faculty Lecture Series will continue on Thursday, Feb. 16, with a lecture by Lois Banta, associate professor of biology at Williams College. Banta’s talk, titled “The Genetic Engineer in Your Own Backyard: Lessons for Sustainable Agriculture from a Manipulating Menace?” will take place at 4 p.m. in Wege Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in Schow atrium.
The subject of the lecture is Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a naturally occurring soil bacterium that has the ability to genetically modify plants. Agrobacterium causes “plant cancer,” in which new genetic information from the bacterium causes tumors to form on infected plants. Research in Banta’s lab focuses on the defenses that plants use to protect themselves from pathogen attack and the mechanisms Agrobacterium has evolved to subvert those defenses. New discoveries about this plant-bacterium interaction may provide insights into ways to increase crop yields by enhancing plant resistance to bacterial infection.
Banta joined the Williams College faculty in 2000 as a visiting associate professor and received tenure in 2008. Her primary area of focus is microbiology, and her teaching interests include human genomics and cancer, public health, and agricultural technology. She has taught courses including Integrative Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics; Microbiology: and Cellular Regulatory Mechanisms.
Banta’s research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Bacteriology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Journal of Cell Biology. She has received grants to support her research from the National Science Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Banta also served on the National Research Council committee where she reviewed the National Plant Genome Initiatives, and was a Senior Fulbright Fellow in the Netherlands.
Banta received her B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology.
The next speaker in the Faculty Lecture Series will be David Tucker-Smith, associate professor of physics, who will give a talk on Feb. 23 titled “Searching for the Higgs at the LHC.”
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