Members of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) joined a broad range of stakeholders, including academics, industry representatives and government officials last week in Des Moines, Iowa, to discuss progress on cooperative efforts to sequence the maize genome.

Debate continues on how best to move forward with generation of sequence information, making a clear case for a centralized high-quality genome sequence resource for researchers, according to Gary Davis, chair of NCGA’s Research and Business Development Action Team.

In an effort to address this concern, NCGA in March announced Ceres, Inc., Monsanto Company and DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., would transfer existing maize sequencing information to a searchable database on the Internet. NCGA launched that database, www.maizeseq.org, in July. The database is hosted by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.

“Corn is the most economically important plant in the United States, and we continue to find new uses,” Davis said. “If this genome sequencing effort improves yield by even 1 percent, then it will easily pay for itself.”

Nathan Danielson, NCGA’s director of biotechnology and business development, said the meeting brought together the groups that will benefit most from increased research on the maize genome. The group discussed application of this genome research to produce better crops, identified what research needs to be emphasized to best benefit all participants and outlined how to accomplish this research.

One major concern voiced by the group was that because the corn genome sequence is not complete, corn researchers are being forced to use other plants when asking scientific questions.

“A lot of research to date has been done on Arabidiposis (a member of the mustard family used as a model organism in plant biology), and it has answered some important questions,” said Corn Board member Kyle Phillips, a farmer from Knoxville, Iowa. “But in order to continue to feed the world in the future, we must now work on crop plants as well. It is clearly time to move beyond the model plant and onto a plant that will actually increase value to American growers and consumers.”

Another issue the group addressed was the need for funding to move from genomics to actual application of information to produce better crops. Even after the genome is mapped, funding will be necessary to support further examination and application of the sequence, according to Dr. Jo Messing of Rutgers University.

“Once we have the sequence completed and in the right order, it will still be very important to continue investigation into the function and regulation of the genes,” he said. “And one of the concerns at the meeting was whether sufficient funding will be there for those efforts.”

The group also discussed the need to understand the genetic diversity that exists in corn. According to Danielson, quality research shows that certain types of corn don’t contain all of the genes that other types possess.

“To truly understand the species, we’ll need to understand some genetic sequences from a number of different types of corn,” he said. “And we’ll need to have a detailed reference sequence for comparison.”

Messing said mapping the corn genome, which is comparable in size to the human genome, is a task of overwhelming proportions and couldn’t be completed in a timely manner by any single entity. He said a completed maize genome would be an invaluable resource for genomics research.

“This effort could not be done by smaller individual groups,” he said. “There has been a bottleneck with the mapping of this genome that hasn’t allowed us to move forward, but once that bottleneck is removed, there are many groups out there that will advance in their own research very quickly. My colleagues in the academic community are very grateful to the National Corn Growers Association for advancing the analysis of the functions of the maize genome.”

Academics won’t be only group to benefit from a completed genome, Davis said. “It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved,” he said. “In addition to the research community, this effort will benefit growers and consumers.”