. Energy News .




FARM NEWS
Texas cotton getting a genetic 'tune-up'
by Staff Writers
College Station TX (SPX) Nov 14, 2012


Contemporary production of cotton in Texas and elsewhere requires cotton seed with superb genes, plus good production infrastructure and technology, superb growers and a good dose of luck.

Can you imagine trying to build a competitive race car with old parts? Chances are, the entry would not fare well at the Indy 500. Very much the same thing might be said about today's crops, according to a Texas A and M AgriLife Research scientist.

"Contemporary crops such as Texas cotton are like finely tuned racing machines - they need high quality parts to perform optimally," said Dr. David Stelly, AgriLife Research cotton geneticist in College Station. "And they constantly need new ones to replace ones that are no longer functional, as well as those that are still effective but no longer at the cutting edge of competition."

Stelly said his role in the AgriLife Research cotton breeding program is to infuse new genes and gene combinations into the genetics and breeding research arena, "so that we can utilize natural genetic resources to help meet the many challenges breeding programs face."

Transferring genes into a cultivated crop from a wild species "is like swimming upstream, one is fighting all sorts of biological and genetic barriers," he said. For years, he and his long-time research assistant, Dwaine Raska, have been transferring the alien genes by a special breeding process called "chromosome substitution."

"Using chromosome substitution, we can target one pair of cultivated cotton chromosomes at a time, and replace it with the corresponding pair of chromosomes from a wild species chosen as the donor. On average, each substitution replaces about 2,000 cotton genes with donor genes," Stelly said.

Having already developed chromosome substitution lines for many chromosomes from three donor species, Stelly is working in collaboration with a former graduate student, Dr. Sukumar Saha, now with the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service unit at Mississippi State University, and his associates, to document their effects on cotton plant and fiber improvement.

Stelly noted that the chromosome substitution breeding and research was made possible only because of teamwork among researchers and research supporters, especially AgriLife Research, the Texas State Support Committee, Cotton Inc., the Texas Department of Agriculture's Food and Fiber Research Commission and the Agricultural Research Service.

To significantly advance the cotton industry's "racing machines," breeders must shop around to find the best parts, and figure out how to optimize their contributions to performance, he said.

"Fortunately, nature provides a plethora of genetic variation," Stelly said. "It's up to us to find it, move it into agronomically useful types, and to figure out how to use it wisely. Whether mechanical or genetic, making one change often requires that others be made to achieve superiority."

Contemporary production of cotton in Texas and elsewhere requires cotton seed with superb genes, plus good production infrastructure and technology, superb growers and a good dose of luck, he said.

"If a grower sows cotton seeds lacking a fantastic set of genes that confer high production, high fiber quality, resilience to stresses, pests and pathogens, expectations for the crop would be less than good from the outset."

The grower's requirements pose an extreme challenge for cotton breeding programs that release cultivated varieties, because producers must buy elite genetic types that are good-to-great for all traits, Stelly said.

Because of the ever-present pressure for rapid development of successful cultivars, U.S. breeding programs have historically relied heavily on previously developed cultivars and closely related lines as parents, he said. This recycling of genes from relatively few historically elite agricultural types of cotton has created a genetic "bottleneck."

"We have excellent genetic types of cotton and excellent cotton breeders, but we need 'new blood' or new cotton genes, to create lots of new genetic combinations, of which a few are likely to yield significant improvements," Stelly said.

While Texas leads the U.S. in cotton production, producing about 25 percent of the nation's crop on about 6 million acres, there is competition to this No. 1 cash crop for the state, Stelly said.

"Industrial technologies and competition from synthetic petroleum-based fibers demand significant modifications and enhancements to cotton fiber physical and chemical properties, especially those that affect dying and high-speed processing," he said.

Also, ongoing climate changes will alter the scope and scale of the challenges found in current production areas, and probably lead to production in new areas with new sets of biotic and abiotic problems, Stelly said.

"We can use genes to address these challenges and competition in the field," he said.

Genetic improvements or modifications can help keep pests and pathogens at bay, fight off abiotic stresses such as cold, heat, water deficiencies, salt and nutrient deficiencies, Stelly said.

Stelly sees the opportunities for genetic improvements as almost unlimited, and very exciting.

"A key ingredient, in almost all scenarios, is the availability of ample amounts of genetic variation that is available to the breeder to mold new, improved genetic types using the combinatorial 'magic' of Mendelian heredity," Stelly said. "We are concomitantly developing high-throughput DNA marker methods for cotton to expedite that follow-through work with the chromosome substitution lines."

Traditional breeding methods are not very effective for infusing wild germplasm into cotton, he said, because during the back-crossing process, "we think that the alien genes get eliminated very quickly." Stelly uses a modified method for chromosome substitution to avoid those problems almost completely.

The effects differ among each alien chromosome, he said, ultimately depending on which genes are present on that substituted chromosome, and how they interact with the other approximate 58,000 genes found in Upland cotton.

Stelly said they are beginning to apply genomics tools to determine which genes are present, which are expressed and how they interact. Once developed, the lines produced by the project can be screened and "used by anyone ... and for essentially any trait subject to genetic control," he said.

"The resulting advances will enable the baseline performances of cotton to be elevated, and could lead to unforeseen revolutionary advances."

Stelly said one of the group's main activities at present is to recruit partners - breeders, physiologists, pathologists - in studying these new chromosome substitution lines.

"We are actively seeking partners to help breed derived types that can help the research community pinpoint single-gene and multi-gene effects in manners complementary to other means of genetic analysis," he said. "My expectation is that with the aid of marker-based selection, the cotton breeding community will be able to use these new kinds of wild germplasm resources far, far more effectively than in the past. It just keeps getting more and more exciting."

.


Related Links
Texas A and M AgriLife Communications
Farming Today - Suppliers and Technology






Comment on this article via your Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail login.

Share this article via these popular social media networks
del.icio.usdel.icio.us DiggDigg RedditReddit GoogleGoogle




Memory Foam Mattress Review

Newsletters :: SpaceDaily Express :: SpaceWar Express :: TerraDaily Express :: Energy Daily
XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News

Get Our Free Newsletters
Space - Defense - Environment - Energy - Solar - Nuclear

...





FARM NEWS
S. America weather upsets soy crop yields
Buenos Aires (UPI) Nov 13, 2012
Weather is upsetting expectations of crop yields in Argentina, Brazil and neighboring countries, all of whom depend on commodity exports for significant parts of their export earnings. Flood conditions in Argentina and continuing drought in central Brazil are blamed by agriculture officials for canceling out projections made earlier in the year for production of key agricultural crops, ... read more


FARM NEWS
Surveying Earth's interior with atomic clocks

Storms, Ozone, Vegetation and More: NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP Satellite Returns First Year of Data

NASA's SPoRT Team Tracks Hurricane Sandy

Sizing up biomass from space

FARM NEWS
Quattro Group Gains Visibility And Control With Ctrack

Gazprom to Launch Two Satellites by Yearend

Research cruise testing EGNOS satnav for ships

Two SOPS accepts command and control of newest GPS satellite

FARM NEWS
Inspiration from Mother Nature leads to improved wood

Action needed to prevent more devastating tree diseases entering the UK

Texas A and M scientist taking infrared laser look at forests

Forest fertilization can increase production, decrease carbon emissions

FARM NEWS
14,000 Jobs Possible from Military Biofuels Initiative

Airbus, EADS and ENN make a push for new generation aviation fuels

A Better Route to Xylan

More Bang for the Biofuel Buck

FARM NEWS
2012 National Solar Jobs Census Finds Installers Leading the Way

Balfour Beatty Communities and SolarCity Team Up

Midwestern Solar Icon Moves into Solar

Eclipsall Solar PV Panels Featured on Three Municipal Buildings

FARM NEWS
AREVA deploys its industrial plan to produce a 100 percent French wind power technology

Gannets could be affected by offshore energy developments

Scotland approves 85MW Highlands wind farm

China backs suit against Obama over wind farm deal

FARM NEWS
US shale gas drives up coal exports

Coal investment in Queensland unlikely

Australian coal projects mega polluters?

Australian coal basin may be top 10 polluter: Greenpeace

FARM NEWS
China's Xi says party faces problems including graft

China appoints respected economist to target graft

Penpics of China's new Communist Party leaders

Child journalists grill ministers at China congress




The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2012 - Space Media Network. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement