Dr. Andrew Doust, associate professor of botany at Oklahoma State University, was awarded a 4-year grant totaling $3.2 million from the National Science Foundation’s Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP). Doust will be studying genetic regulation of specialized branches in grasses, known as “tillers”. Tillers play important roles in grain yield and biomass accumulation, yet the full suite of genes that contribute to their initiation and growth is largely unknown.
As part of this project, Doust will also be working closely with Dr. Julie Angle, OSU assistant professor and coordinator of the secondary science education program, to integrate high school science teachers into a research environment during the summers, combined with professional development activities, to help educators gain a deeper understanding into how scientific knowledge is generated and to assist them with curriculum development.
This project also includes researchers at Brigham Young University, West Virginia University, and the Plant Gene Expression Center in Berkeley, California.
“Tillering is of great interest because it is both genetically regulated and exquisitely sensitive to environmental conditions,” Doust said. “Part of the domestication process is to desensitize the plant to environmental cues to allow us to grow crop plants very close together. Understanding how grasses (and other plants) branch is to understand the central objective of a plant, how to control the space around it. Control of tillering allows a grass to respond to environmental cues and to preferentially move energy from photosynthesis to either more vegetative growth by increasing branching, or more grain production by decreasing branching.”
This project exploits the evolutionary variation and changes that took place during domestication in maize, sorghum and foxtail millet, three cereals in the panicoid subfamily of grasses. These three crop species have sequenced genomes and, in all three, domestication has been accompanied by selective suppression of tiller production in exchange for increased planting density and higher seed yield compared to their wild highly-tillered ancestors. Forward and reverse genetic approaches and transcriptomic analysis in both ancestral and domesticated genetic backgrounds will provide insight into the gene networks necessary for growth and development of tillers in panicoid grasses, which should facilitate the development of better biofuel and perennial grain crops.
The Plant Genome Research Program is under NSF’s Directorate for Biological Sciences. The program began as part of the National Plant Genome Initiative, an interagency working group coordinated by the National Science and Technology Council. The goals of the program are to support basic research to address fundamental questions in plant biology at the genome-wide scale; and to build genomic resources, tools, and technologies to be made available to other researchers to enable future discoveries in basic and applied sciences to address societal issues related to agriculture and the environment.
