Commercialization advice?
Seek help from CoMotion staff. They have been very helpful and supportive throughout the journey and can provide lots of resources from funding to training to mentoring.
What CoMotion services and resources have you used and how did they help?
I’ve received funding through the Innovation Gap Fund that was especially critical during lean grant times and allowed us to move into other areas for new innovations.
What do you like most about working with CoMotion?
Having one contact person all these years was really helpful to me since my innovation manager knows all about my research and serves as the liaison to company partnerships.
Tell us a fun anecdote about your journey on the path to commercialization:
In 2017, the sequencing company, Illumina, filmed us as part of their series on “Adventures in Genomics” with our story on “Power of Plant Partnerships”. That was a really fun experience having the film crew come to visit one of our research sites at the Snoqualmie River and to turn our labs into a filming studio.
Background and Bio:
I am a plant microbiologist with a B.S. in Genetics (UC Davis), Ph.D. in Microbiology (UW), and postdoctoral training in Plant Biochemistry (UW). While I was doing poplar tissue culture as a postdoc, I kept seeing a microbial “contaminant” in my plant cultures. Identification of it being a Rhizobium species known to provide the essential nutrient, nitrogen, to legumes and not to non-legumes like poplar, led to a new direction in my research towards understanding the potential benefits of the natural microbiota of plants. It was through “following the data” over the years that led to our projects on harnessing the power of the plant microbiome for nutrient acquisition, biocontrol of pathogens, detoxification of pollutants, and improved tolerance to abiotic stresses including drought.
Connect:
Lab website: https://sites.uw.edu/sldoty/
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About UW CoMotion: CoMotion at the UW partners with the UW community on their innovation journey, providing tools, connections, and acumen to transform ideas into economic and societal impact.