News Release
05-21-2008
Shui-zhang Fei (left) and Ursula Frei discuss
how genetic differences between ryegrass
varieties help the plant adapt to sudden
temperature changes. Photo by Bob Elbert
Contacts:
Stephen Howell, Plant Sciences Institute, (515) 294-5252, shh@iastate.edu
Meg Gordon, Plant Sciences Institute Communications, (515) 294-3945,
mbgordon@iastate.edu
Iowa State University’s Plant Sciences Institute awards funding to six innovative research projects.
AMES, Iowa — The Plant Sciences Institute has awarded grants to six new research projects to help Iowa State University maintain leadership in agricultural research. Because the prospects for climate change could place extra burdens on our agricultural system for the production of food, feed and fuel, the institute called for proposals addressing climate change issues—along with proposals to enhance the institute’s portfolio of research initiative projects in areas that include biorenewables, crop protection and genomics. Each grant provides between $15,000-30,000 a year for two years.
“Our innovative grants program has helped the institute move in new directions by mobilizing the efforts of the research community toward issues of importance to Iowa agriculture,” says Stephen Howell, institute director.
One prediction of climate change is weather extremes—brief periods of heat or cold, wet or dry. In this regard Plant Sciences Institute scientist Ursula Frei and Shui-zhang Fei, associate professor in the Department of Horticulture, seek to identify key genes in the acclimatization of perennial ryegrass to brief periods of cold.
Perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne) is an important forage and turf crop and is being considered as a possible cover crop for maize production systems where stover is removed for lignocellulosic biofuel production. But, winter hardiness will be a major component to any cover crop’s success.
Using a Mediterranean cultivar and a Nordic landrace, the researchers will study the differences in gene expression between the warm climate variety and its cold climate cousin in response to sudden temperature changes and will identify the genes that confer flexible winter hardiness.
Candidate genes will be tested by transferring them to the related grass, Brachypodium distachyon--an emerging model species of temperate grasses. If successful, these genes could possibly be exploited to other commercially important relatives such as rice, wheat and corn.
In the area of biorenewables, Fei along with Kan Wang, professor in the Department of Agronomy and Yanhai Yin, assistant professor in the Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology will help to establish a resource for the study of the temperate grass model species, Brachypodium distachyon—advancing efforts by the grass research community that is aggressively looking to rapidly improve feedstocks for cellulosic ethanol production.
Brachypodium is an advantageous model because of its relatively small genome as compared to rice, its shorter life cycle, its stature and its already established genetic manipulation protocol
The group will use molecular technologies to generate a collection of Brachypodium plants where the activity of different individual genes is silenced. By studying what physically changes when the given gene is rendered inactive, the team will gain insight into each gene’s normal function.
Also in the area of biorenewables, Olga Zabotina, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology will tackle the intricacies of cell wall biochemistry.
Understanding plant cell wall architecture in prospective energy feedstocks such as corn stover or switchgrass could provide insights on the interrelationship between cell wall structure, the ease of degradability and sugar accessibility for making ethanol.
Loosening the cell wall matrix would significantly improve the cost effectiveness of cellulosic ethanol production by making more sugars more accessible to conversion enzymes.
Zabotina will biochemically analyze the cell wall components most important to biofuel feedstock development (hemicellulose, lignin, cellulose) using different ecotypes of switchgrass and a specific low-lignin maize mutant. She will also work to understand the steps involved in pushing plants to make more sugars, as well as natural enzymes that could work within to loosen the matrix.
In the area of crop protection, one of the institute’s innovative grants will support Iowa State’s contribution to the efforts of an international team of scientists studying Asian soybean rust. The team, assembled and led by Steven Whitham, associate professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, and Thomas Baum, professor and chair in the Department of Plant Pathology is searching for a biotechnological solution to rust infections by working out the mechanisms of infection and natural plant defense when the fungus attacks.
Baum and Whitham will work to identify proteins secreted by the rust fungus during infection. It is believed that these proteins help the fungus combat the soybean plant’s natural defense mechanism and facilitate its theft of nutrients. They will identify the genes that encode these proteins and test their function with their eye on the ultimate goal—to elucidate the molecular mechanism of soybean plant-fungus interaction.
Two grants contribute to more fundamental areas of plant science. David Hannapel, professor in the Department of Horticulture, and Guru Rao, professor and interim chair in the Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology, will focus efforts on understanding how a tiny RNA molecule transmits information from the leaf of a potato plant where it is made down below ground to an organ called the stolon, initiating tuber formation. In response to sunlight, this mobile RNA is transported through plant veins from leaves to stolons by catching a ride on a special protein that Rao and Hannapel will work to identify.
Understanding the fundamentals of this mechanism and the research protocols that result will advance an understanding of the metabolic interplay between plants and sunlight and provide molecular tools to enhance crop production.
In the area of genomics, Srinivas Aluru, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will develop software tools to help researchers employing next generation sequencing technologies to interpret the enormous amount of data generated by this instrumentation.
New high-throughput sequencing technologies becoming available to the Iowa State research community through PSI support will generate vast data sets. Accompanying development of customized software tools to make sense of information that will range from new raw sequence now being generated in shorter segments, to transcriptome analyses and digital gene expression readouts is a necessity. -30-
