With robotics, computers and advanced genetics, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have established a core set of genes that help plants metabolize nitrogen, the key to plant growth and crop yield. They published their findings Oct. 24 in the journal .
鈥淣itrogen metabolism is incredibly important for growth,鈥 said Siobhan Brady, associate professor of plant biology at 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis and senior author on the paper. The invention of nitrogen fertilizers over 100 years ago has enabled a massive expansion in agricultural productivity to feed billions of people. But at the same time, runoff of excess pesticides into soils, waterways and the oceans has many negative impacts.
By understanding the genes that control how plants take up and use nitrogen, scientists like Brady hope to give plant breeders tools to generate crop varieties that need less fertilizer or make better use of it.
鈥淚f we want to breed nitrogen-efficient plants, we need to look at these genes,鈥 she said. 鈥淭his will open up a lot of research.鈥
Science at the root
鈥淲e know the genes that are involved in nitrogen assimilation and transport but we don鈥檛 understand all the ways that nitrogen metabolism is regulated,鈥 Brady said.
What鈥檚 more, most of these regulatory genes, called transcription factors because they control the transcription (or activity) of other genes, have been identified in stems, shoots and leaves 鈥 but not many in roots, where nitrogen actually gets into a plant from the soil.
Brady鈥檚 laboratory aims to discover the networks of genes that shape how plant roots live and grow. Because nitrogen is so important to plants, graduate student Allison Gaudinier and Brady took the premise that transcription factors for nitrogen metabolism would also be linked to other important processes.
Gaudinier used robotics to screen transcription factors against hundreds of genes at a time, assembling them into a network. Adjunct Associate Professor Doreen Ware and colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory used computational methods to predict which genes were most important in the network. The 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis team could then study the role of those genes in plants.
The results establish a core set of genes that are critical in nitrogen metabolism, Brady said.
Ware is a scientist with the USDA鈥檚 Agricultural Research Service. Other authors on the paper are: at 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis, Joel Rodriguez-Medina, Anne-Maarit B氓gman, Jessica Foret, Michelle Tang, Baohua Li, Daniel Runcie and Daniel J. Kliebenstein; Lifang Zhang, Andrew Olson and Christophe Liseron-Monfilsat, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, New York; Shane Abbitt, Bo Shen and Mary J. Frank, Corteva Agriscience, Johnston, Iowa.
The work was supported by Corteva Agriscience, Agriculture Division of DowDuPont (formerly DuPont Pioneer) with additional support from the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of California fellowships.
Media Resources
Siobhan Brady, Plant Biology, 530-752-2721, sbrady@ucdavis.edu
Andy Fell, News and Media Relations, 530-752-4533, ahfell@ucdavis.edu