Hoosier corn feeds millions worldwide and offers significant potential as an automotive biofuel, produced in South Bend’s New Energy Corp. corn ethanol plant. Relying on genome modeling, corn crops may be genetically fine-tuned to produce both improved food corn and stronger nonfood fibers for advanced biofuel production rapidly.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced today that the first genome-scale model for predicting functions of genes and gene networks has been developed by an international team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by the Berkeley Lab. Called RiceNet, the model may speed development of improved strains of corn and rice to act as advanced biofuels. Scientists are hopeful the new model also will help boost crop production and improve the quality of two important food staples.
“With RiceNet, instead of working on one gene at a time based on data from a single experimental set, we can predict the function of entire networks of genes, as well as entire genetic pathways that regular a particular biological process,” says Pamela Ronald, a plant geneticst who is directing the grass genetics program. Ronald also is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology with the University of California Davis. “We have conducted experiments that validated RiceNet’s predictive power for genes involved in the rice innate immune response,” says Ronald.
She and her team also showed that RiceNet can accurately predict gene functions in maize, otherwise known as corn.
“RiceNet offers an attractive and potentially rapid route for focusing crop engineering efforts on the small sets of genes that are deemed most likely to affect the traits of interest,” explains Ronald.
JBEI is one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in 2007, through DOE's Office of Science. The centers are pursuing scientific breakthroughs to make production of biofuels from nonfood plant fiber cost effective on a national scale.
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