Agricultural systems must adapt to sustainably meet society?s needs for affordable food, feed, biofuel and industrial products, while facing accelerating climate change and a growing population. To reach this goal, it is essential to enhance our knowledge of the biological mechanisms crop plants use to respond to stresses, store nutrients and interact with pests and beneficial organisms. The ability to manipulate a plant?s genetic information is a crucial tool scientists use to study plant biology, and to produce new and enhanced crop varieties. It is recognized, however, that capacity is lacking across the plant science research community to genetically modify the important crop plants. This severely limits scientists? ability to develop the basic knowledge and the new crop varieties that society requires. This project seeks to overcome this constraint by forming a public/private sector partnership to develop simple and efficient genetic modification technologies applicable across the economically important grass and cereal crops. Specifically, recent advances that stimulate regeneration of plants from leaf tissues will be leveraged to adapt for effective use in maize, sorghum, wheat, barley, the millets and biofuel crops. Importantly, the tools developed will be made available to all researchers. In addition, the knowledge and techniques will be disseminated freely through an existing network of more than 800 scientists engaged in the area of plant transformation. By the end of the three-year project, it is the goal that scientists will be able to produce genetically modified plants needed to accelerate their research programs and in so doing, will be better equipped to deliver the improved crops needed by society now, and in the future.
Advances in plant science are presently constrained by lack of capacity for production of transgenic and genome edited plants. Development of Baby boom (Bbm) Wuschel2 (Wus2) technology, coupled with leaf transformation, presents a crucial opportunity to overcome this bottleneck. Leaf-based Bbm/Wus2 technology presents a fundamental shift for transformation in the grasses. Leaf explants are easy to obtain and prepare, presenting new potential for production of transgenic plants in clonally propagated grasses, for species that do not breed true, and for grains with seed size too small to be amenable to seed-based transformation. Recent reports show Bbm/Wus2 leaf transformation to be efficient and genotype-flexible in maize. This project use a public/private collaboration to leverage leaf-based Bbm/Wus2 transformation and develop simplified, robust, and highly efficient transformation systems across the cereal, forage and grass biofuel crops. Novel Bbm/Wus2 expression systems will be developed and optimized for multiple varieties in each species and methods validated for efficacy and transferability by replicating across the collaborating laboratories. All Bbm/Wus2 vectors and tools will be newly synthesized and made freely available for research purposes through public, non-profit repositories. Methodologies will be published and disseminated through the PlantGENE Research Coordination Network (https://plantgene.sivb.org/). This will enable rapid, widespread adoption of leaf-based Bbm/Wus2 technology by the plant science community and provide public sector scientists with the tools and knowledge to produce the genetically modified plants needed to support and accelerate their research programs.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
