News Release

NSF awards University of Georgia $8.7 million for crop genetics research

Grant and Award Announcement

University of Georgia

The National Science Foundation has awarded three grants to the University of Georgia to support research which aims to decipher the genetic blueprint of economically important crops in the grass family and identify useful genes for crop improvement, such as ones that confer drought tolerance. The total value of the awards is $8.7 million over four years.

“The grass family, which includes valuable food plants, is unrivalled in terms of economic and ecological importance,” said Gordhan Patel, vice president for research and associate provost. “The research that these NSF awards support will not only advance knowledge in basic plant genetics but also may lead to improvements in crops such as sorghum, rice and wheat.”

Putting Genes in Context

A four-year, $3.97 million award will enable UGA plant geneticist Andrew Paterson and collaborators at UGA, Clemson and Cornell to “apply genetic maps and genomic tools to better understand sorghum biology and productivity,” Paterson said. Sorghum is the world’s fifth most important cereal crop and second most important feed grain, with an annual value of $1.5 billion in the United States alone.

“One phase of this project is to build the skeleton on which the research community will be able to flesh out a complete sequence of the sorghum genome, much like the publicly-funded human genome project in the ’90’s,” said Paterson, director of UGA’s Center for Applied Genetic Technologies.

Other phases of this project will look beyond the information available from sequencing. How a gene functions and how it is inherited are influenced by the genes and other non-genic DNA that are near it on the chromosome. This relationship is reflected in the order of genes along the chromosomes, the density of genes and “junk DNA,” and the levels of diversity in genes that are found in natural populations of plants.

“There’s a lot known now about the human genome, for example, as the result of sequencing but there will be much more learned as the sequence is placed within its native context — the context of a chromosome,” said Paterson.

One project goal will be to develop a sorghum physical map that shows the actual location of genes and other markers on the chromosomes and includes a wide variety other data.

Paterson’s lab also will study sugarcane, which is a close relative of sorghum, as part of a collaborative effort with a Brazilian sugarcane initiative.

“Different crops have been domesticated for different purposes,” Paterson said. “Sorghum has been selected for seed production and sugarcane has been selected for biomass production.”

By comparing the genetic make-up of the two crops, Paterson said he hopes to learn which genes are involved in making seeds and which are involved in producing biomass — the leaves, stems and roots. As an alternative to fossil fuels, there is renewed interest in developing biomass crops as a possible sustainable energy source.

Paterson’s grant is a renewal of a $3.2 million NSF award made three years ago. The earlier grant concentrated on building a basic toolkit to enable researchers to ask genome-wide questions in sorghum.

“In higher plants, we’ve not had a substantial amount of funding available in the public sector to build genomic tools until the National Science Foundation kicked off this initiative in 1998,” Paterson said. “The earlier grant was awarded in the first year of that initiative.”

Looking for Genes to Help Crops Adapt

UGA plant scientist Lee Pratt, a co-investigator on Paterson’s earlier grant, received $3.6 million to pursue a different line of sorghum research over the next three years. Pratt’s group aims to identify genes that improve plant growth in adverse environments.

“Our goal is to focus on genes related to various kinds of stresses, especially abiotic ones such as high light exposure, air pollution, drought and soil nutrient limitations,” said Pratt, Distinguished Research Professor in UGA’s botany department.

In the earlier grant, Pratt’s lab identified 15,000 unique sorghum genes. By the end of the new project, he said he expects to have increased the total number of genes isolated to 20,000, whichmay represent as much as two-thirds of all sorghum genes.

Pratt’s group also will determine which of these genes are active under stress conditions by using a new method called microarray technology where expression of thousands of genes can be detected simultaneously.

To handle the large volume of biological data that will be generated by the project, powerful computer-based tools will be developed to manage and analyze data and share it with other researchers. The use of bioinformatics — an emerging discipline at the interface of biology and computer science — will facilitate the discovery process by allowing researchers to mine the data quickly to detect genes and link diverse kinds of information.

In addition to research, the grant provides for undergraduate training in these new technologies. Currently, Pratt’s lab recruits undergraduates from under-represented groups with majors that range from pre-medicine to pre-law to business. Ten or more students will work in his lab at a time, learning everything from DNA sequencing to bioinformatics.

Collaborators on the project include researchers from Texas A&M, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and Tokyo University.

Genes to Revolutionize Plant Improvement

A third award of $1.1 million will support Tifton-based horticulture professor Peggy Ozias-Akins’ work on grass family genetics.

Ozias-Akins’ lab will focus on a wild pearl millet relative that has a trait called apomixis — a botanical curiosity where plants produce seeds that are clones of the mother plant.

“Apomixis is not a common trait but it is more frequently observed in the grass and sunflower families,” Ozias-Akins said. “This trait is rare in domesticated plants and absent from our major crops.” If the trait for apomixis could be introduced into crops by gene transfer, it could revolutionize plant improvement and seed production.

“There is huge significance in use of apomixis in agriculture,” Ozias-Akins said. “For example, a lot of self-pollinating crops such as peanuts must be ‘selfed’ for several generations before a new variety can be released on the market.”

Apomixis would make it quicker for plant breeders to get new varieties on the market and seed production in high performance hybrid varieties would be greatly simplified.

Other UGA collaborators for these three grants include: John Bowers, Joann Conner, Marie-Michèle Cordonnier-Pratt, Alan Gingle and Daniel Peterson.

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