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Columns::November 5, 2001
Ride of Five: Community re-enacts birth of Athens Nov. 8
Educational leadership department to be reconfigured
ICE age
Building a healthy future
Governor presides over dedication for new new center for study of water
Holidays for calendar year 2002 announced
Forest Resources staff awards
Campus Closeup
College of Pharmacy names its first assistant dean for student affairs
Kudos
Celebrating beginnings (old & new)
Campus News
Three faculty win NSF grants of $8.7 million for plant research
By Kathleen Cason
kmc@ovpr.uga.edu
The National Science Foundation has awarded three grants to the university to support plant genetics research. The proposed research 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 unrivaled in terms of economic and ecological importance,” says 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.”
A grant of $3.97 million over four years went to Andrew Paterson of the department of crop and soil sciences to study the genetics of sorghum. Lee Pratt, Research Professor of Botany, received a grant of $3.6 million over three years for a separate project on sorghum. Peggy Ozias-Akins, professor of horticulture at the Coastal Plain Experiment Station in Tifton, was awarded $1.1 million to continue her work on grass family genetics.
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| Andrew Paterson |
The four-year, $3.97 million award will enable 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 says. 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 ’90s,” says Paterson, director of UGA’s Center for Applied Genetic Technologies.
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 their initiative in 1998,” Paterson says. “The earlier grant was awarded in the first year of that initiative.”
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
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| Lee Pratt |
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,” says Pratt.
In the earlier grant, Pratt’s lab identified 15,000 unique sorghum genes. By the end of the new project, he says, he expects to have increased the total number of genes isolated to 20,000, which may 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.
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 UGA, Texas A&M, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
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| Peggy Ozias-Akins |
Agricultural Research Service and Tokyo University.
A third award of $1.1 million will support Tifton-based horticulture professor Peggy Ozias-Akins’s work on grass family genetics. Ozias-Akins’s 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 says. “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 says. “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.
Investments in the infrastructure to support research contributed to UGA’s success in securing the three grants. A $750,000 gift from the UGA Research Foundation to establish the Genome Analysis Facility in 1998 paved the way for a $12 million investment from the Georgia Research Alliance for new lab space, greenhouses and genomics instrumentation. |
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