Urbana, Illinois
May 25, 2004One of the
five newly named research themes of the Institute for Genomic
Biology under construction at the
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign has landed the institute's first
major federal grant.
A three-year $2.98 million
grant from the U.S. Department of Energy will allow a team led
by Evan DeLucia, a professor of plant biology, to focus on the
genetic responses of soybeans to climate change. The DOE's
Office of Biological and Environmental Research approved the
grant this month.
DeLucia's work falls under the
Genomic Ecology of Global Change research theme, directed by
plant scientist Don Ort. The theme was announced in April by IGB
Director Harris Lewin.
Under the project, soybeans --
a crop vital to the state's agricultural economy -- will be used
as a model system for using new and emerging genomic
technologies to answer unresolved questions arising from
climatic changes projected for the next century.
"We'll be using genomic
technologies that are new and untested with soybeans, a crop
whose genetic makeup already is pretty well defined," DeLucia
said. "We want to know how changes in carbon dioxide and ozone
concentrations in the atmosphere affect the productivity of the
crop."
In addition to greenhouse
gases, DeLucia's team will study the potential effects of
drought under global warming conditions and how insect
populations and crop pathogens may change. The project also will
call upon bioinformatics data analysis and the metabolomics
(biochemical profiling) of soybean varieties.
Soybean researchers already
know that the various types of soybeans respond differently to
environmental influences, but they've been unable to identify
the mechanisms that drive such responses. Such new approaches
may help them to do so. "Eventually, by using these new and
developing genomic technologies, agronomists may be able to know
what genes or suites of genes are important for their crops
under specific conditions," DeLucia said.
Such genomic analyses already
are under way in other plant systems such as Arabidopsis
(mustard plant) and rice.
The research will tap into
technologies already available at the Keck Center for
Comparative and Functional Genomics at Illinois and the soybean
functional genomics laboratory directed by crop scientist Lila
Vodkin. It also will build upon already existing research at
SoyFACE, a futuristic crop experiment on the South Farms where
corn and soybeans are growing in open field conditions under
concentrations of carbon dioxide and ozone levels projected for
the year 2050.
The Illinois Council on Food
and Agricultural Research funded the startup of SoyFACE. "With
this DOE grant," DeLucia said, "we are now more than doubling
CFAR's initial investment, bringing federal dollars into the
state of Illinois."
The research will be at the
leading edge of plant and environmental biology, Lewin said.
"The new space in IGB was a critical component of the success of
this proposal, and I expect this formula to be repeated for the
other IGB research themes," he said.
Five postdoctoral researchers
will be hired to work fulltime on the new project, DeLucia said.
Another four to five graduate students also will participate.
Until the IGB facility is completed, the postdoctoral students
and graduate students will be housed in the laboratories of
DeLucia and co-investigators Ort, Ross D. Fitzhugh and Hans J.
Bohnert, all of plant biology; Stephen P. Long of crop sciences;
May Berenbaum of entomology; and Steven Clough of crop sciences
and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. |