Dr. Claude Fauquet ILTAB/Donald Danforth Plant Science Center 975 North Warson Road St. Louis, MO 63132 Phone: 314.587.1241 Fax: 314.587.1956

Front row, left to right: Claude Fauquet, Sarah Grogan, Ariel Simmons, DeAnna Booker, Hellen Apio, Sareena Sahab, Mala Jayatilleke Middle row, left to right: Pat Cosgrove, Ratna Kumria, Basavaprabhu Patil, Tira Jones, Theodore Moll, Xian Xie, Nigel Taylor Back row, left to right: Emmanuel Ogwok, Jitender Yadav, John Odipio, Basavarej Bagewadi, David Corbin, Muhammad Shah Nawaz Ul-Rehman Khan, Mohammad Abhary

ILTAB was established in 1991 with a mission to develop the techniques and products of tropical plant biotechnology and to transfer knowledge and resources to developing countries. By doing so, it will help these countries improve their agricultural production in a sustainable manner, providing useful research tools and training young scientists from these countries.

Three major crops were initially chosen to act as a core for the research activities:

• rice: the most important staple food crop in the world; continued improvements in yield are essential for food security of an increasing human population;
• cassava: the first food crop in Africa--an orphan crop of great importance for subsistence farmers and with unrealized potential for industrial exploitation;
• tomato: the major source of vitamins in tropical countries.

Research projects have also been initiated on yam, sweet potato, cotton, sugarcane, and a number of other tropical and sub-tropical crop species, contributing to the wide range of experience within ILTAB.

ILTAB is headed by Dr. Claude Fauquet. Dr. Fauquet is a leading expert on virus taxonomy and on the biological diversity and control of plant viruses. He obtained his academic degrees from the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg. Prior to co-founding the ILTAB program at the Scripps Institute with Dr. Beachy in 1991, Fauquet worked for nineteen years as a plant virologist for ORSTOM (now IRD), a French public research institute dedicated to helping developing countries. For fourteen of those years, Fauquet was stationed at a French research center in the Ivory Coast.