When Electrical Engineering senior Diego Segura Ibarra joined Louisiana Tech University in the Winter of 2018, he planned to earn an electrical engineering degree that would prepare him for a career in his dream field of integrated circuits. What he found was a community as invested in his success as he was.
Segura Ibarra learned about Louisiana Tech’s internationally renowned project-based engineering curricula through Study Union, an agency that helps place Colombian students in programs that will help them learn a second language. The organization placed his older brother in an independent institution in Boston where he could complete an ELS (English as a Second Language) program. A few years later when he was ready to join his brother in the U.S., Study Union connected him to the ELS program at Louisiana Tech where he could join a world-famous Electrical Engineering program afterward and his brother could study architecture.
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IMAGE: The ability of a high-quality genome for a hazelnut species provides resources for high-precision molecular breeding instead of the traditional empirical breeding methods. view more
Credit: Hoticulture Research
Humans have been breeding plants for their economic value for thousands of years. Traditionally, plant breeding techniques included cumbersome and time-consuming techniques like grafting and hybridization to enhance traits of economic value like disease resistance and high nutrition content. Now, with the ability to edit plant DNA using revolutionary gene-editing tools, particularly the CRISPR-Cas9 system, it is possible to enhance traits of economic value in plants easily and more efficiently than by using traditional techniques. But for that, it is necessary to sequence whole genomes of economically important crops and identify all the genes controlling these desirable traits.