The National Science Foundation has awarded $8.7 million in three
grants to the University of Georgia to support plant genetics
research.
The UGA research will aim to decipher the genetic blueprint of
valuable plants in the grass family and identify useful genes to
make crops more drought-tolerant, among other things.
“The grass family, which includes valuable food plants, is
unrivaled in terms of economic and ecological importance,” said
Gordhan Patel, vice president for research and associate
provost.
“The research these NSF awards support will not only advance
knowledge in basic plant genetics,” Patel said, “but may lead to
improvements in crops such as sorghum, rice and wheat.”
Sorghum Biology, Productivity
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. Its annual value is $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 1990s,” said Paterson, director of the UGA Center
for Applied Genetic Technologies.
Other phases of the project will look beyond the information
available from sequencing into how various genes function and how
they’re inherited.
Paterson’s lab also will study sugarcane, a close relative of
sorghum, as part of a collaborative effort with a Brazilian
sugarcane initiative. The grant is a renewal of a $3.2 million
NSF award three years ago.
Improving Stress Tolerance
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 the UGA botany
department.
In the earlier grant, Pratt’s lab identified 15,000 unique
sorghum genes. By the end of the new project, he expects to have
increased the number to 20,000, which may be as much as
two-thirds of all sorghum genes.
Pratt’s group also will find which of these genes are active
under stress by using a new method called microarray technology,
in which the expression of thousands of genes can be detected
simultaneously.
Collaborators on the project include researchers from UGA, Texas
A&M, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research
Service and Tokyo University.
A third award of $1.1 million will support Tifton, Ga.,
horticulture professor Peggy Ozias-Akins’ work on grass family
genetics.
Focusing on Apomixis
Ozias-Akins’ lab will focus on a wild pearl millet relative that
has a trait called apomixis, a botanical curiosity in which
plants produce seeds that are clones of the mother plant.
“Apomixis is not a common trait but 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 has the potential to revolutionize plant improvement
and seed production.
Other UGA collaborators for these grants include John Bowers,
Joann Conner, Marie-Michèle Cordonnier-Pratt, Alan Gingle and
Daniel Peterson.
