NSF doles out $14 million for plant genome research
The National Science Foundation (NSF) in January announced ten awards totaling $14 million to study the genomes of several economically important plants, including cotton, canola, maize, wheat, radishes and rice as well as some of their respective weedy relatives, and pine trees. The one- and two-year awards, which range as high as $2.73 million, were made to a series of academic and not-for-profit research institutions and consortia. The researchers will address questions such as the role of polyploidy in genome evolution, the genomic basis of speciation and relationships between cultivated plants and their weedy relatives. Some crop plants are polyploid, meaning they contain multiple genomes that are subject to dramatic changes in content and organization. Thus, for example, this round of NSF grants will support researchers at Iowa State University studying polyploidy in cotton, and other researchers at the University of Missouri studying the impact of polyploidy among Brassica species, such as canola and brussels sprouts. NSF stipulates that the findings from these projects are to be published in the peer-reviewed literature whereas sequence data are to be deposited in GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). “The outcomes of this new program will tie together studies of the evolution of gene structure, function and regulation across the whole plant kingdom,” says James Collins, NSF assistant director for biological sciences. JLF
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