THE DEPARTMENT of Agriculture (DA) has feted a UST College of Science professor for her studies on marine biotechnology.
Assoc. Prof. Mary Beth Maningas, a UST Research Center for the Natural Sciences and Applied Sciences fellow, was among DA’s Filipino Faces of Biotechnology in 2020.
One study of Maningas focused on the contagious white spot disease among shrimps.
She came up with a method using loop-mediated isothermal amplification, a DNA amplification technique, to help shrimp farmers visually detect the white spot syndrome virus, which is highly lethal for shrimps and causes economic losses to the shrimp aquaculture industry.
“All our projects are biotechnology-related researches,” she told the Varsitarian. “We have implemented these projects and they have supported several graduate students and perhaps more than a hundred undergraduate students in the completion of their research work in the University.”
Maningas said the Philippines needs more Filipino biotechnologists to take advantage of the country’s biodiversity, which she said was the “richest” in the entire world.
“I pursued this career path because statistics show that the Philippines, an archipelagic country, ironically has very few experts in the field of aquatic biotechnology,” she said.
“We have the richest biodiversity in the entire world and yet very few of us are delving into this field… If we do not manage these resources efficiently and effectively using science-based strategies, these will soon be depleted and will result in either scarcity, depletion or extinction,” Maningas added.
Her research on the field also earned her a 2016 Newton Fund for Leaders in Innovation Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering in the United Kingdom.
The DA’s Filipino Faces of Biotechnology awards aim to “recognize and honor the champions of biotechnology in the Philippines.”
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the awarding ceremony for this year’s batch was moved to next year. M.D.M.P. Reyes
