In 2006, Zhanyuan Zhang, an MU professor of plant sciences, was approached by Dow AgroSciences. The industry giant came bearing pieces of DNA and a problem for Zhang to solve.
Industrial agriculture faced a new wave of herbicide-resistant weeds in fields worldwide, which threatened to make Roundup — the most popular weedkiller among farmers — useless. Dow wanted to create a new strain of soybeans that could tolerate a different herbicide. Because Zhang is an expert in transforming plant genetics, the company tapped him to help.
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University research on dicamba, which received scrutiny because of the widespread crop damage it caused in recent years, was funded by service orders.
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