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  • WHERE I WORK

A deep-rooted appreciation for the health benefits of plants

Kehinde Apara draws on artificial intelligence and her own family background to source flora for her work at a California bioprospecting company.
  1. James Mitchell Crow

    1. James Mitchell Crow is a freelance science writer in Melbourne, Australia.

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Kehinde Apara, a plant researcher, in her lab

Kehinde Apara is a raw-materials research and sourcing associate at Brightseed in San Francisco, California. Credit: Ian Tuttle for Nature

I love being surrounded by plants every day. Here, it’s February, and I’m in my laboratory in San Francisco, California, where I work for a company called Brightseed. I break plants down into fine powders so our scientists can uncover each plant’s metabolome — the complete set of small molecules that it makes. Brightseed aims to find the molecules that matter in terms of human health and nutrition.

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Nature 593, 306 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01254-x

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