Biotech Updates

NSF Funds Research in Crop Comparative Genomics

January 12, 2007

The National Science Foundation (NSF) doled out $14 million in new awards to advance research in comparative genomics of economically important plants. Universities that received grants from the NSF include the Iowa State University for the study of polyploidy in cotton; University of Missouri for research on polyploidy in Brassica species; and University of Georgia and the University of Arizona for developing sequence resources to study genome organization in wheat and rice.

Projects based at the University of California at Davis and Cornell University will catalog variants in pine trees and in maize, respectively, to allow researchers to link genetic variation with changes in gene function. At Washington University St. Louis, researchers will investigate the red rice genome associated with weediness, while scientists at Michigan State University will examine differences in gene expression in weedy and cultivated radishes.

Readers can access the press release at http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=108263&org=NSF&from=news.