I was reading about the passing on Alexander Grothendieck, and something caught my interest:

Mr. Grothendieck was able to answer concrete questions about these relationships by finding universal mathematical principles that could shed unexpected light on them. Applications of his work are evident in fields as diverse as genetics, cryptography and robotics.NYtimes

After extensive googling, I haven't been able to come with examples. I know robotics uses matrices for kinematics, and that genetics uses matrices for higher dimensional data analysis. But I am not sure if this is related to Grothendieck's work. How has his work been applied to these fields?