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Recent advancements in molecular tools for plant genetic engineering, particularly CRISPR-based technologies, have created new opportunities for targeted genome editing. However, applying these tools remains challenging in crop species such as sunflower (Helianthus annuus) that lack established and effective transformation pipelines, including transient reagent delivery methods for functional screening and validation of genetic engineering tools. To address this gap, three major reagent delivery platforms, namely protoplast transfection, leaf infiltration, and Agrobacterium-mediated tissue co-culture, were systematically adapted and assessed for use in sunflower seedlings. While each method enabled successful reagent delivery, they differed in their levels of scalability and efficiency. With these platforms, delivery by different Agrobacterium strains and the effectiveness of various reporter gene expression cassettes were compared to define the most experimentally suitable components for different applications in sunflowers. Together, these results establish a foundational toolkit for transient functional testing in sunflower and pave the way for more sophisticated genetic engineering approaches in this agriculturally important oilseed, confectionary seed, and horticultural crop. 

Non-governmental organizations for environmental conservation have a significant interest in monitoring conservation-related media and getting timely updates about infrastructure construction projects as they may cause massive impact to key conservation areas. Such monitoring, however, is difficult and time-consuming. We introduce NewsPanda, a toolkit which automatically detects and analyzes online articles related to environmental conservation and infrastructure construction. We fine-tune a BERT-based model using active learning methods and noise correction algorithms to identify articles that are relevant to conservation and infrastructure construction. For the identified articles, we perform further analysis, extracting keywords and finding potentially related sources. NewsPanda has been successfully deployed by the World Wide Fund for Nature teams in the UK, India, and Nepal since February 2022. It currently monitors over 80,000 websites and 1,074 conservation sites across India and Nepal, saving more than 30 hours of human efforts weekly. We have now scaled it up to cover 60,000 conservation sites globally.