Post by Dr Penny Hundleby CSci, FRSB

Deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Dr. Mary-Dell Chilton, a monumental figure in plant biology and a true pioneer of agricultural biotechnology. As someone who has spent decades working in crop transformation, I know firsthand that our entire field stands on the shoulders of a small group of visionary pioneers. The late 1970s and early 1980s were an extraordinary time for science, defined by a historic, friendly race between Mary-Dell’s team at Washington University and the brilliant team of Marc Van Montagu and Jeff Schell at Ghent University in Belgium (with Mary's team just getting there first - creating the first GM plant). These breakthroughs in unlocking and "disarming" the Ti-plasmid of Agrobacterium tumefaciens completely revolutionized how we understand and improve crops. Without their combined discoveries, the vital advancements we make today in crop genetic technologies - including modern gene editing - simply wouldn’t exist. Mary-Dell was an incredible trailblazer, a World Food Prize Laureate, and an inspiration for women in STEM. Her legacy lives on in laboratories all over the world, including our work here at the John Innes Centre, where Agrobacterium-mediated transformation remains an indispensable research tool for aiding our understanding of gene function 🔬🧬🦠🌱#PlantScience #Biotechnology #WomenInSTEM #Agrobacterium #CropTransformation https://lnkd.in/eZP_V7c7