Category Archives: Transhuman News

Through the Iowa Corn Promotion Boards investment in research, Iowa corn farmers continue making strides in sustainably increasing corn plant efficiency while reducing the environmental impact of corn production.

In 2014, ICPB embarked on creating a public, broad-umbrella initiative to translate genomic information for the benefit of growers, consumers and society. The initiative, called Genomes To Fields, is funded with the Iowa Corn Promotion Board, National Corn Growers Association and now includes 21 states plus Ontario. This program leverages the mapping of the corn genome to identify key corn genetic traits that impact yield and the plants ability to respond to environmental stressors to design a better corn plant in the future.

When the genes of corn were mapped back in 2009, for the first time we could see all the genes in a corn plant, said Iowa Corn Research and Business Development Committee Chair Curt Mether, a farmer from Logan. But having the complete corn gene sequenced doesnt tell us anything about what all these genes do in terms of crop growth and production. So, the Iowa Corn Promotion Board has been taking the initiative to do something about this.

Corn growth and productivity is determined by its genes and how those genes interact with the environmental conditions in which a corn plant is placed, such as temperature, rainfall, soil types, and pests, something researchers refer to as the Genotype x Environment interaction, or GxE. To understand how genes affect corn growth, we need to evaluate this GxE effect for a large number of hybrids (genotypes) grown in a wide range of environments.

At the beginning of the program, Iowa Corns Research and Business Development committee funded the Genomes To Field Initiative (aka Phenotyping), with the initial emphasis on the GxE Trial, where hundreds of genotyped corn hybrids grown across dozens of environments in several states, from New York to Arizona to South Dakota to Georgia. The objective was to understand how genes and environments interact to impact corn traits and performance.

One of the requirements of the committee has always been that the results of this work needs to be public, explained Mether. A key step is building an open source data information site for corn research. This past month that finally happened. The 2014 and 2015 data is now publicly available with the 2016 data available to G2F researchers.

This represents the largest dataset of corn genotype, environmental and phenotypic data that has ever been made available to researchers at universities and agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This knowledge base will assist seed companies in commercializing improved corn hybrids and will advance farmers precision farming techniques including the more efficient use of land and the more precise use of pesticides and fertilizers, Mether said.

But the release of this dataset marks just the beginning, not the end. Unlike sequencing the corn genome, which was completed in 2009, researchers will never be finished collecting phenotype data and understanding how plants respond to various environmental factors. This dataset represents the beginnings of a resource that will continue to grow and become more valuable over time. It will allow researchers to convert the corn genome sequence into functional knowledge and develop new methods and devices to analyze the relationship between genetic, trait and environmental data to predict performance of plants.

2017 will be the fourth year of the G2F GxE Trials including three new states. The initiative is working closely with Iowa Corn Growers Association in developing a strategy to use with Congress and government agencies to obtain research funding. Funds raised by the Iowa Corn Promotion Board, Illinois Corn and Nebraska Corn boards have been matched by grants from the USDAs National Institute of Food and Agriculture totaling $500,000.

To learn more about ICPBs research and science funding, visit iowacorn.org/research.

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Iowa Corn Promotion Board invests in genome research - High Plains Journal

More Than Bread and Beer

Humans have found a friend in yeast. The single-celled eukaryotes are used by humans for a wide variety of applications, such as making alcoholic beverages and baking, among others. Scientists are heading toward a breakthrough in bioengineering that could create synthetic organisms that will help make new kinds of drugs and fuels.

An international team of researchers has been able to devise a way to synthesize a large part of yeasts genetic code. Prior to this announcement, the team had been able to completely synthesize one of yeasts 16 chromosomes. Now, the team has published a series of papers in the journal Scienceshowing that they have been able to add another five chromosomes, thus bringing their total to six. They say theyre on track to finish the remaining ten chromosomes to form a completely synthetic genome by the end of this year.

While the scientific community remains leery of synthetic genome creation, many have united in praising this projects work. In an article accompanying the research, Daniel Gibson, vice president of DNA technologies at Synthetic Genomics, stated, This is really going to allow us to understand how to design cells from the bottom up that can be reprogrammed for many applications.

Some of those many applications are what worry bioethicists, biologists, and environmentalists, among others. Todd Kuiken from North Carolina State Universitys Genetic Engineering and Society Center compares the potential accidental orpurposeful release of synthetic organisms to the introduction of invasive species. You can think of it of like introducing an invasive species into a different environment. It will have some type of impact to the system.

The yeast project is operating under conditions emphasizing safety as well as ethics. This is a whole new era where were moving beyond little edits on single genes to being able to write whatever we want throughout the genome, says George Church, a prominent Harvard University geneticist. The goal is to be able to change it as radically as our understanding permits.

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Scientists Are Close to Creating a Fully Synthetic Genome - Futurism