Thomas Lubberstedt - US grants

This Partnerships for Innovation project from Iowa State University (ISU) will accelerate fundamental understanding in plant science and breeding with a screening platform that significantly reduces the time and costs for selecting and developing new elite plant varieties. The immediate goal is to build upon and re-engineer a promising near infrared (NIR)-based seed-screening platform to increase its performance and accuracy and broaden its applications. The envisioned platform is based on two complementary components: a) NIR molecular spectroscopy and chemometrics integrated with automated, nondestructive high-throughput screening of seeds and other plant materials, and b) customized development of application methodologies that screen extant plant populations based on biochemical phenotypes. This project seeks to meet the challenge presented by the success of high-throughput DNA sequencing and analysis of plant genomes, by establishing analogous high-throughput technologies to analyze a plant's biochemical phenotype. This capability will enhance the ability of plant scientists and plant breeders to utilize genomics and develop improved new cultivars needed to accommodate the global population explosion anticipated in the 21st century. The proposed phenotype-screening platform will have a significant impact on food, feed, and bio-energy production systems because, for the first time, plant scientists and breeders will have access to a unique research tool that will routinely assess, at low cost, multiple plant traits simultaneously and non-destructively based upon biochemical phenotypes.

The broader impacts of this research are societal, economic, and learning related. At the societal level, plants have a remarkable, multi-faceted impact on economies, jobs, health, fuel, climate change/carbon sequestration, food security, world peace, the environment, and our overall well being. Better understanding of plant biology, improving existing varieties, and developing new ones are all key research areas where biochemical phenotype screening will produce invaluable data for achieving sustainable and nurturing ecosystems for a rapidly changing planet. At the economic level, these improvements will greatly enhance the versatility of the screening platform, expand the user base, and make lower cost screening accessible to more public and commercial plant scientists and breeders. At the learning level, the KEP participants will learn from each other. The project will be a vehicle for Iowa State University faculty and students and small businesses to understand how each other's abilities can be integrated to enable technological solutions to real world-challenges.

Partners at the inception of the project are Brownseed Genetics (Bay City, WI), Genetic Enterprises International (Johnston, IA), Kemin Industries (Des Moines, IA), MTEC BioAnalytics (Ames, IA), Schillinger Genetics (West Des Moines, IA), and Sustainable Oils (Bozeman, MT). Five ISU researchers and these six small businesses will collaborate in a Knowledge Enhancing Partnership (KEP). MTEC BioAnalytics will bring NIR seed screening technology expertise to the project while the other companies have expertise in seed and other plant based products. MTEC BioAnalytics will provide key highthroughput screening platform components (e.g., ultra fast fiber optic switch), engineering design, and the others will provide the use of proprietary and unique collections of characterized seeds that express variation in desirable biochemical phenotypes.

A new center is to be planned based at Iowa State University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign named the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Doubled Haploid Research (CeDHR). CeDHR plans to provide the basic research foundation necessary for the applied research goals of industry and will make the process of Doubled Haploid line production both more effective and available in species where it is currently unavailable. The research scope, comprised of four primary areas, is unique among I/UCRCs: 1) Isolation of genes involved in the haploid induction and genome doubling process, 2) Establishment of a DH system in species, where it is not available yet, 3) Efficient screening procedures for haploids, and 4) A novel concept of an in vitro nursery including automation of this process and methods.

In order to meet the projected increase of global demand for food, feed, and fibre (100% by 2050), the efficiency, reliability, and speed of genetic improvement must be accelerated. The mission for the proposed Center will be to streamline and link the efforts of industry and academia towards speeding up plant breeding using doubled haploid (DH) through a formalized and extended research partnership. Students and postdoctoral researchers within the proposed Center will receive professional development training at both ISU and UIUC. In addition, industry representatives have indicated their need for scientists with multidisciplinary undergraduate or graduate training; a primary goal of the Center will be to address this critical training and educational need. Center trainees, including minorities and underrepresented groups, will be drawn from diverse backgrounds. Research findings will be disseminated internationally.

An award is made to Iowa State University to develop and construct an Enviratron, a facility to test and evaluate the performance of plants under variable environmental conditions. To date most research on the performance of plants under different environmental conditions has been conducted with a limited number of differences, such as a single environmental stress versus control (unstressed) conditions. The Enviratron will permit researchers to incrementally alter multiple critical variables to better simulate changing conditions that will be faced in the future. The Enviratron will be an important research and training tool for students in the plant sciences, particularly for underrepresented minorities who will participate in the project through the George Washington Carver Summer Research Internship Program. It will provide them with the experience of simulating different environmental conditions or different climates of the world and the opportunity to study and improve the performance of plants under those conditions. It will also inspire engineering students to learn how to work hand in hand with plant scientists. The Enviratron will also be a demonstration centerpiece open to farmers and other visitors to promote appreciation and a better understanding of agricultural research.

Understanding how organisms in the biosphere can adapt to climate change is one of the grand scientific challenges of these times. This project creates a phenomics platform that will enable researchers to non-destructively monitor the performance of plants throughout their lifecycle under variable environmental conditions. The Enviratron represents a revolutionary new design in plant phenomics facilities. It consists of an array of plant growth chambers to create different environmental conditions. Unlike commercial plant phenomics systems, plants will not be conveyed out of the growth chambers to monitor their growth performance, rather a rover with a robotically controlled arm will periodically visit each chamber to image and analyze the plants. In addition to more standard visible light, fluorescence, near infrared and infrared imaging, sensors on the rover will be capable of imaging and conducting analyses not available on commercial systems such as hyperspectral and holographic imaging and Raman spectroscopy. The robot-assisted sensing approach will enable precise location-specific data acquisition, resulting in improved sampling strategies and data quality. The Enviratron will be used for research as well as graduate and undergraduate student training and will be located in a facility where it can be used to educate the public about climate change research.