I am a post-doctoral research scientist within Rothamsted Research’s BBSRC-funded 20:20 Wheat® program, which aims to provide the knowledge base and tools to increase the UK wheat yield potential from 8.4 to 20 tons of wheat per hectare within the next 20 years. Field phenotyping is one component of this program and facilitates the non-destructive monitoring of field-grown crops. Traditional methods of field phenotyping require huge human effort, which consequently limits the accuracy, frequency, and number of different measurements that can be taken at one time. Fortunately, Rothamsted has an exciting solution to this problem.
The Field Scanalyzer
Dr Kasra Sabermanesh shows off the Field Scanalyzer. Image credit: Rothamsted Research
Our field phenotyping platform, the Field Scanalyzer (constructed by LemnaTec GmbH and being further developed by ourselves), supports a motorized measuring platform with multiple sensors that can be accurately positioned anywhere within a dedicated field. The sensor array comprises a high-definition RGB camera, two hyperspectral cameras, a thermal infrared camera, a system for imaging chlorophyll fluorescence and twin scanning lasers for 3D information capture. Together, these sensors generate a wealth of data about crop growth, architecture, performance, and health. The Field Scanalyzer operates autonomously and in high-throughput, meaning it can take a lot of non-destructive measurements without human supervision, throughout the crops lifecycle, with high-accuracy and reproducibility. (You can read more about the Field Scanalyzer in our recent paper: http://www.publish.csiro.au/FP/pdf/FP16163).
We are currently using the Field Scanalyzer to identify new characteristics of crops that relate to performance, as well as identifying new genetic diversity for existing traits. Outputs from either of these research components can be delivered to breeders. We are screening approximately 400 wheat varieties, but also imaging some oilseed rape and oat plants.
The scanalyzer. Image credit: Rothamsted Research
The big data problem
The Field Scanalyzer at Rothamsted is a world first, so we initially had to develop all the necessary image acquisition protocols and image processing tools, in order to exploit its full capabilities. A number of image processing tools are available; however, they are not suitable for field-grown crops, as they were not developed for complex canopies consisting of hundreds of plants in highly dynamic ambient conditions. The platform can generate up to 100 TB data with a year’s continuous operation (using all of the sensors). That’s why I work with two other post-docs to develop robust computer vision tools to automate the way we extracting quantitative image datasets. We are also validating the accuracy of the values extracted from our images by comparing them with measurements obtained manually.
Approximately 1.5 years have passed since we first began operating the Field Scanalyzer, and we have now optimized all of our image acquisition protocols and have collected a full seasonal dataset. With the good quality images stored in our database, we have developed some robust tools to automatically extract the information about some key growth stages (ear emergence and flowering), as well as quantifying height and the number of some plant organs. We are still just scraping the surface though, and have a list of traits for which we want to develop computer vision tools, in order to automatically analyze them.
Take to the skies: Drones for data collection
Some of my colleagues work with drones (UAVs) to capture information about crop height, plant density (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), and canopy temperature from large-scale field trials containing 5000 plots. They also fly the UAVs over our Field Scanalyzer site, so we can compare data collected from the higher flying UAV with those collected from the Field Scanalyzer at close proximity. The way we see it, UAVs can image large fields in a very short time (15 min), so if we notice something interesting using the UAV at the large plot-scale, we can put the material under the Field Scanalyzer for high-resolution phenotyping. On the other hand, with the Field Scanalyzer, once we gain a better understanding of which trait/s we need to focus on, when we should be looking at them, and exactly which sensor/s are required to quantify the trait, we can deploy drones with the necessary sensors (once the sensors are portable enough) to collect this information at field-scale and at the appropriate time.
Taking to the skies: Drones are used for large-scale phenotyping at Rothamsted. Credit: Rothamsted Research.
The future of phenotyping
I envision that the future of phenotyping technology will focus on reducing the cost and size of cameras/sensors, ultimately increasing their portability and accessibility. This will result in more sophisticated cameras being attached to UAVs (as many of sensors we currently use far out-weigh a UAV’s payload). Parallel to this, research efforts are focusing on developing image processing systems that efficiently extract quantitative information about the crops from acquired images. Together, phenotyping systems such as low-flying UAVs that generate easily interpreted data outputs could be developed, which may be more widely adopted by breeders and farmers to get a deeper insight into their crop’s health and performance.
Another fantastic year of discovery is over – read on for our 2016 plant science top picks!
January
A Zostera marina meadow in the Archipelago Sea, southwest Finland. Image credit: Christoffer Boström (Olsen et al., 2016. Nature).
The year began with the publication of the fascinating eelgrass (Zostera marina) genome by an international team of researchers. This marine monocot descended from land-dwelling ancestors, but went through a dramatic adaptation to life in the ocean, in what the lead author Professor Jeanine Olsen described as, “arguably the most extreme adaptation a terrestrial… species can undergo”.
One of the most interesting revelations was that eelgrass cannot make stomatal pores because it has completely lost the genes responsible for regulating their development. It also ditched genes involved in perceiving UV light, which does not penetrate well through its deep water habitat.
Plants are known to form new organs throughout their lifecycle, but it was not previously clear how they organized their cell development to form the right shapes. In February, researchers in Germany used an exciting new type of high-resolution fluorescence microscope to observe every individual cell in a developing lateral root, following the complex arrangement of their cell division over time.
Using this new four-dimensional cell lineage map of lateral root development in combination with computer modelling, the team revealed that, while the contribution of each cell is not pre-determined, the cells self-organize to regulate the overall development of the root in a predictable manner.
Watch the mesmerizing cell division in lateral root development in the video below, which accompanied the paper:
In March, a Spanish team of researchers revealed how the anti-wilting molecular machinery involved in preserving cell turgor assembles in response to drought. They found that a family of small proteins, the CARs, act in clusters to guide proteins to the cell membrane, in what author Dr. Pedro Luis Rodriguez described as “a kind of landing strip, acting as molecular antennas that call out to other proteins as and when necessary to orchestrate the required cellular response”.
This plant root is infected with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Image credit: University of Zurich.
In April, we received an amazing insight into the ‘decision-making ability’ of plants when a Swiss team discovered that plants can punish mutualist fungi that try to cheat them. In a clever experiment, the researchers provided a plant with two mutualistic partners; a ‘generous’ fungus that provides the plant with a lot of phosphates in return for carbohydrates, and a ‘meaner’ fungus that attempts to reduce the amount of phosphate it ‘pays’. They revealed that the plants can starve the meaner fungus, providing fewer carbohydrates until it pays its phosphate bill.
Author Professor Andres Wiemskenexplains: “The plant exploits the competitive situation of the two fungi in a targeted manner, triggering what is essentially a market-based process determined by cost and performance”.
The transition of ancient plants from water onto land was one of the most important events in our planet’s evolution, but required a massive change in plant biology. Suddenly plants risked drying out, so had to develop new ways to survive drought.
In May, an international team discovered a key gene in moss (Physcomitrella patens) that allows it to tolerate dehydration. This gene, ANR, was an ancient adaptation of an algal gene that allowed the early plants to respond to the drought-signaling hormone ABA. Its evolution is still a mystery, though, as author Dr. Sean Stevensonexplains: “What’s interesting is that aquatic algae can’t respond to ABA: the next challenge is to discover how this hormone signaling process arose.”
Sometimes revisiting old ideas can pay off, as a US team revealed in June. In 1930, Ernst Münch hypothesized that transport through the phloem sieve tubes in the plant vascular tissue is driven by pressure gradients, but no-one really knew how this would account for the massive pressure required to move nutrients through something as large as a tree.
Professor Michael Knoblauch and colleagues spent decades devising new methods to investigate pressures and flow within phloem without disrupting the system. He eventually developed a suite of techniques, including a picogauge with the help of his son, Jan, to measure tiny pressure differences in the plants. They found that plants can alter the shape of their phloem vessels to change the pressure within them, allowing them to transport sugars over varying distances, which provided strong support for Münch flow.
BLOG: We featured similar work (including an amazing video of the wound response in sieve tubes) by Knoblauch’s collaborator, Dr. Winfried Peters, on the blog – read it here!
July
Preserved remains of rope, seeds, reeds and pellets (left), and a desiccated barley grain (right) found at Yoram Cave in the Judean Desert. Credit: Uri Davidovich and Ehud Weiss.
In July, an international and highly multidisciplinary team published the genome of 6,000-year-old barley grains excavated from a cave in Israel, the oldest plant genome reconstructed to date. The grains were visually and genetically very similar to modern barley, showing that this crop was domesticated very early on in our agricultural history. With more analysis ongoing, author Dr. Verena Schünemannpredicts that “DNA-analysis of archaeological remains of prehistoric plants will provide us with novel insights into the origin, domestication and spread of crop plants”.
BLOG: We interviewed Dr. Nils Stein about this fascinating work on the blog – click here to read more!
August
Another exciting cereal paper was published in August, when an Australian team revealed that C4 photosynthesis occurs in wheat seeds. Like many important crops, wheat leaves perform C3 photosynthesis, which is a less efficient process, so many researchers are attempting to engineer the complex C4 photosynthesis pathway into C3 crops.
This discovery was completely unexpected, as throughout its evolution wheat has been a C3 plant. Author Professor Robert Henrysuggested: “One theory is that as [atmospheric] carbon dioxide began to decline, [wheat’s] seeds evolved a C4 pathway to capture more sunlight to convert to energy.”
Professor Stefan Jansson cooks up “Tagliatelle with CRISPRy fried vegetables”. Image credit: Stefan Jansson.
September marked an historic event. Professor Stefan Jansson cooked up the world’s first CRISPR meal, tagliatelle with CRISPRy fried vegetables (genome-edited cabbage). Jansson has paved the way for CRISPR in Europe; while the EU is yet to make a decision about how CRISPR-edited plants will be regulated, Jansson successfully convinced the Swedish Board of Agriculture to rule that plants edited in a manner that could have been achieved by traditional breeding (i.e. the deletion or minor mutation of a gene, but not the insertion of a gene from another species) cannot be treated as a GMO.
Phytochromes help plants detect day length by sensing differences in red and far-red light, but a UK-Germany research collaboration revealed that these receptors switch roles at night to become thermometers, helping plants to respond to seasonal changes in temperature.
Dr Philip Wiggeexplains: “Just as mercury rises in a thermometer, the rate at which phytochromes revert to their inactive state during the night is a direct measure of temperature. The lower the temperature, the slower phytochromes revert to inactivity, so the molecules spend more time in their active, growth-suppressing state. This is why plants are slower to grow in winter”.
A fossil ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) leaf with its modern counterpart. Image credit: Gigascience.
In November, a Chinese team published the genome of Ginkgo biloba¸ the oldest extant tree species. Its large (10.6 Gb) genome has previously impeded our understanding of this living fossil, but researchers will now be able to investigate its ~42,000 genes to understand its interesting characteristics, such as resistance to stress and dioecious reproduction, and how it remained almost unchanged in the 270 million years it has existed.
Author Professor Yunpeng Zhaosaid, “Such a genome fills a major phylogenetic gap of land plants, and provides key genetic resources to address evolutionary questions [such as the] phylogenetic relationships of gymnosperm lineages, [and the] evolution of genome and genes in land plants”.
The year ended with another fascinating discovery from a Danish team, who used fluorescent tags and microscopy to confirm the existence of metabolons, clusters of metabolic enzymes that have never been detected in cells before. These metabolons can assemble rapidly in response to a stimulus, working as a metabolic production line to efficiently produce the required compounds. Scientists have been looking for metabolons for 40 years, and this discovery could be crucial for improving our ability to harness the production power of plants.
The year began with a surprising paper that turned our understanding of the phytohormone auxin on its head. Researchers in China and the USA created Arabidopsis knockout mutants of AUXIN BINDING PROTEIN 1 (ABP1), expecting them to fail to respond to auxin and have developmental defects, as previously seen in the abp1-1 knockdown mutant. Instead, these plants were indistinguishable from wild type plants, leading the authors to conclude that ABP1 is not required for auxin signaling or Arabidopsis development as previously believed.
A paper later in the year from the same authors found that the embryonic lethality of the abp1-1 mutant is actually caused by the off-target linked deletion of the adjacent BSM gene.
The tale of ABP1 was examined in more detail on the GARNet blog, Weeding the Gems, which concluded: “In many ways this story is an excellent example of how science should work, where claims are independently tested to ensure that earlier experiments have been conducted or interpreted correctly.” Click here to read more.
February
A clever experiment from Germany led to a significant breakthrough in crop protection from insect pests.
When double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) is present within a eukaryotic cell, it is cleaved by the Dicer enzyme to form short interfering RNAs. These can bind to complementary RNA within a cell to target it for destruction, thus silencing the corresponding gene expression. This process is known as RNA interference (RNAi).
RNAi has previously been used to tackle insect herbivory by expressing insect-specific dsRNA in plants; however the protection has previously been incomplete. In this new study, published in Science, researchers produced dsRNA within chloroplasts, which do not have RNAi machinery. When dsRNA is expressed in the cytoplasm, the plant’s own Dicer enzyme breaks most of it down. When expressed in the chloroplasts, the dsRNA remained intact when eaten by insects, which proved much more effective at killing these pests.
Another crop protection study followed in March, when researchers in China cloned the genetic locus in rice that confers broad-spectrum resistance to planthoppers – insect pests that cause the loss of billions of dollars of crops per year. Three lectin receptor kinase genes were found in rice cultivars from the Philippines, which enable plants to survive an infestation of insects. When cloned into a susceptible rice cultivar, these genes conferred resistance to two different planthopper species.
Understanding the genetic basis of resistance is very important as marker-assisted breeding and selection could be used to develop resistant rice varieties, and potentially utilized in other species of cereal.
A European collaboration led to the development of 3DCellAtlas, a computational approach that semi-automatically identifies cell types in a developing 3D organ without the need for transgenic lineage markers. This program will enable the interpretation of dynamic organ growth and the spatial and temporal context of developmental cell divisions that produce the resultant plant. It could be integrated with growth in different conditions or with developmental mutants to examine exactly how these processes affect growth in 3D.
A special issue of the Plant Biotechnology Journal was published in May, focusing on the amazing advances in molecular farming. While the entire issue is worth delving into, we were particularly intrigued by the review on moss-made pharmaceuticals, which outlines the rapid progress made in the field.
The model moss Physcomitrella patens has rapidly become one of the organisms of choice in biotechnology, with a fully sequenced genome and an outstanding toolbox for genome-engineering. The authors describe how moss-made pharmaceuticals can easily be produced while remaining remarkably more stable from batch to batch than cultured animal cells. The system is easily scalable, making their production highly cost effective, and safe. The first moss-made pharmaceuticals are currently in clinical trials, so keep an eye out for much more from this field over the next few years.
In June, US researchers discovered a new role for chloroplast stromules, protrusions that extend from the surface of all plastid types. The function of stromules has been difficult to determine, but this research, published in Developmental Cell, suggests that they may provide a mechanism by which plastid signals are conveyed to the nucleus. The paper shows that chloroplast stromules are induced by defense responses such as programmed cell death signaling, and that the stromules extend to form dynamic connections with the nucleus. The stromules may therefore aid in the amplification and/or transport of immune response signals into the nucleus.
In late 2014 and early 2015, Italian researchers published a set of articles showing that extracellular self-DNA, DNA from conspecifics, could inhibit the growth of organisms from a wide range of taxa, including plants, bacteria, fungi and animals. Conversely, these organisms were not affected by extracellular DNA from other unrelated species.
In July, New Phytologist published a letter offering an interpretation of the data as it relates to plants. Plants could interpret extracellular self-DNA as an indicator of intraspecific competition (which seeds could use as a cue to remain dormant) or of a hostile environment that has already caused the death of conspecifics, signaling them to ramp up their pre-emptive immune response to increase survival after neighbors have been damaged or killed. There are still a lot of mechanisms and ecological effects to be investigated in this new field, but this letter suggests several interesting avenues to investigate.
A US study in August revealed a surprising degree of conservation in gene expression patterns across a wide range of plant taxa during root development. This was particularly interesting because the spikemoss Selaginella was shown to use many of the same genes as the evolutionarily distant angiosperms, despite the fossil record suggesting that roots evolved independently in these two lineages. Perhaps roots in these two groups evolved by independently recruiting the same developmental program, or perhaps by elaborating on a previously unknown proto-root that existed in the common ancestor of vascular plants.
Salt stress can significantly reduce the growth and yield of plants. Researchers in Germany identified two components of the cellulose synthase complex that directly interact with the microtubules and promote their dynamics, which interestingly were highly produced during salt stress conditions. During salt stress, cellulose microtubules depolymerize, however the newly discovered compounds, known as Companions of Cellulose Synthase, promote the reassembly of the microtubule to allow cellulose synthesis to continue.
Throughout the year the GM debate in Europe reached several important milestones. In January the European Union (EU) changed its rules, giving individual countries more flexibility to decide for themselves whether or not to plant GM crops. In February, the UK Science and Technology Committee report stated that EU regulations preventing GM crops are not fit for purpose, and that they should be replaced with a trait-based system.
A collaboration between South African and UK scientists revealed how plants can use their circadian clock to pre-emptively boost their immune resistance at dawn, when fungal infection is most likely. Plants tend to decrease in susceptibility at dawn, but those with dysfunctional circadian clocks remained highly susceptible throughout the day. The research also showed that jasmonate signaling plays a crucial role in the circadian timing of resistance.
Researchers in China published the surprising finding that a single-nucleotide exon exists in the APC11 gene in Arabidopsis. This is the smallest exon ever to be discovered before. The team used an elegant set of APC11-GFP constructs to show that intron splicing around the single-nucleotide exon is effective in both Arabidopsis and rice. This finding has implications for future genome annotations, which might reveal many more single-nucleotide exons.
With another year nearly over we recently put out a call for nominations for the Most Influential Plant Science Research of 2015. Suggestions flooded in, and we also trawled through our social media feeds to see which stories inspired the most discussion and engagement. It was fantastic to read about so much amazing research from around the world. Below are our top five, selected based on impact for the plant science research community, engagement on social media, and importance for both policy and potential end product/application.
Choosing the most inspiring stories was not an easy job. If you think we’ve missed something, please let us know in the comments below, or via Twitter! In the coming weeks we’ll be posting a 2015 Plant Science Round Up, which will include other exciting research that didn’t quite make the top five, so watch this space!
Scientists at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru, found that 291 varieties of sweet potato actually contain bacterial genes. This technically means that sweet potato is a naturally occurring genetically modified crop! Alongside all the general discussion about GM regulations, particularly in parts of Europe where regulations about growing GM crops have been decentralized from Brussels to individual EU Member States, this story caused much discussion on social media when it was published in March of this year.
It is thought that ancestors of the modern sweet potato were genetically modified by bacteria in the soil some 8000 years ago. Scientists hypothesize that it was this modification that made consumption and domestication of the crop possible. Unlike the potato, sweet potato is not a tuber but a mere root. The bacteria genes are thought to be responsible for root swelling, giving it the fleshy appearance we recognize today.
RNA-guided Cas9 nuclease creates targetable heritable mutations in Barley and Brassica
Our number two on the list also relates to genetic modification, this time focusing on methods. Regardless of whether or not we want to have genetically modified crops in our food supply, GM is a valuable tool used by researchers to advance knowledge of gene function at the genetic and phenotypic level. Therefore, systems of modification that make the process faster, cheaper, and more accurate provide fantastic opportunities for the plant science community to progress its understanding.
The Cas9 system is a method of genome editing that can make precise changes at specific locations in the genome relatively cheaply. This novel system uses small non-coding RNA to direct Cas9 nuclease to the DNA target site. This type of RNA is small and easy to program, providing a flexible and easily accessible system for genome editing.
Inheritance of genome modifications using Cas9 has previously been shown in the model plants, Arabidopsis and rice. However, the efficiency of this inheritance, and therefore potential application in crop plants has been questionable.
The breakthrough study published in November by researchers at The Sainsbury Laboratory and John Innes Centre both in Norwich, UK, demonstrated the mutation of two commercial crop plants, Barley and Brassica oleracea, using the Cas9 system and subsequent inheritance mutations.
This is an incredibly exciting development in the plant sciences and opens up many options in the future in terms of genome editing and plant science research.
Striga is a parasitic plant that mainly affects parts of Africa. It is a major threat to food crops such as rice and corn, leading to yield losses worth over 10 billion US dollars, and affecting over 100 million people.
Striga infects the host crop plant through its roots, depriving them of their nutrients and water. The plant hormone strigolactone, which is released by host plants, is known to induce Striga germination when host plants are nearby.
In a study published in August of this year the Striga receptors for this hormone, and the proteins responsible for striga germination were identified.
Striga plants are known to wither and die if they cannot find a host plant upon germination. Induction of early germination using synthetic hormones could therefore remove Striga populations before crops are planted. This work is vital in terms of regulating Striga populations in areas where they are hugely damaging to crop plants and people’s livelihoods.
Resurrection plants are a unique group of flora that can survive extreme water shortages for months or even years. There are more than 130 varieties in the world, and many researchers believe that unlocking the genetic codes of drought-tolerant plants could help farmers working in increasingly hot and dry conditions.
During a drought, the plant acts like a seed, becoming so dry that it appears dead. But as soon as the rains come, the shriveled plant bursts ‘back to life’, turning green and robust in just a few hours.
In November, researchers from the Donald Danforth Plant Science Centre in Missouri, US, published the complete draft genome of Oropetium thomaeum, a resurrection grass species.
O. thomaeum is a small C4 grass species found in Africa and India. It is closely related to major food feed and bioenergy crops. Therefore this work represents a significant step in terms of understanding novel drought tolerance mechanisms that could be used in agriculture.
Supercomputing overcomes major ecological challenge
Currently, one of the greatest challenges for ecologists is to quantify plant diversity and understand how this affects plant survival. For the last 500 years independent research groups around the world have collected this diversity data, which has made organization and collaboration difficult in the past.
Over the last 500 years, independent research groups have collected a wealth of diversity data. The Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) are collecting and collating these data together for the Americas using high performance computing (HPC) and data resources, via the iPlant Collaborative and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). This will allow researchers to draw on data right from the earliest plant collections up to the modern day to understand plant diversity.
There are approximately 120,000 plant species in North and South America, but mapping and determining the hotspots of species richness requires computationally intensive geographic range estimates. With supercomputing the BIEN group could generate and store geographic range estimates for plant species in the Americas.
It also gives ecologists the ability to document continental scale patterns of species diversity, which show where any species of plant might be found. These novel maps could prove a fantastic resource for ecologists working on diversity and conservation.
Read more about this story on the TACC website, here.
I may not be totally unbiased here because of my past involvement in the various national and international Arabidopsis projects, but there is no denying that plant science would not be where it is today if it were not for Arabidopsis. Arabidopsis is the plant that has united the world of basic plant scientists and profoundly changed the way research is conducted in plant sciences. How did this come about? Several prominent scientists described the history of Arabidopsis research from the perspective of researchers (1, 2, and 3). My answer comes from a perspective of a research administrator responsible for the management of the Arabidopsis research programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1990 through 2007.
Philip H. Abelson spoke of “a genomics revolution” in his Science editorial published in 1998 (4). He predicted that “…the greatest ultimate global impact of genomics will result from manipulation of the DNA of plants. Ultimately, the world will obtain most of its food, fuel, fiber, chemical feedstocks, and some of its pharmaceuticals from genetically altered vegetation and trees.” His concluding sentence read, “Today, humans employ the capabilities of only a few plants. A major challenge is to explore the opportunities inherent in some of the hundreds of thousands of them.”
As the editorial was being written, a plant genomics revolution was well underway through the internationally coordinated effort to sequence the whole genome of Arabidopsis by the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI), a consortium of 6 laboratories from U.S., E.U., France, and Japan. The AGI’s work resulted in a paper published in Nature in December of 2000 (5), a first complete genome analysis for a plant and the second for a higher eukaryote. This project differed from traditional research projects in that the goal of the project was not to answer a specific scientific question, but rather to deliver a high quality whole genome sequence of Arabidopsis – a research resource/tool – for the use of the entire community. It was a highly sophisticated service project. AGI members were required to share credit equally not in proportion to individual members’ contributions. Although it took four years for the AGI to complete sequencing of the entire Arabidopsis genome, the sequence data were immediately made available to the public as they were produced. This was a total departure from the previous practice in which the data were not expected to be shared until they were thoroughly analyzed and the result published by the researcher who produced them. In a sense, the AGI researchers were pioneers in opening up a new type of scientific project. I witnessed disagreements and consternations that occurred throughout the project, but in the end the voice of reason always prevailed. I think the Arabidopsis community matured greatly through the whole genome sequencing project. This type of service project has since become an integral part of research portfolio in plant sciences. As a result, individual researchers regardless of their locations can access and mine the data for their own purposes, greatly leveling the playing field and accelerating the advancement of plant sciences as a whole.
Remarkable as the AGI’s success was, it did not just happen. In the background was the culture characterized by the spirit of cooperation through open communication and sharing of ideas and information. The culture was initially fostered by the small number of laboratories working on Arabidopsis and was quickly embraced by the Arabidopsis community. The Arabidopsis community established the Multinational Coordinated Arabidopsis Thaliana Genome Research Project, hereafter referred to as “the Project,” in 1990. The whole genome sequencing project was part of the Project’s long-range plan (6). We should also remember that the AGI received strong support and encouragement from a broad community of plant scientists. Prior to the start of the sequencing project in 1996, NSF heard from a number of individual plant scientists urging NSF to support an Arabidopsis whole genome sequencing project even though it could have meant less money available for their individual research grants. Furthermore, NSF received strong support from several agricultural commodity groups for using part of the plant genome research program’s fund, which was appropriated to support basic research in economically important plants, for the purpose of accelerating the Arabidopsis genome sequencing project. Not to take away the credit from the AGI researchers that they so richly deserve, I believe that the completion of Arabidopsis whole genome sequencing and subsequent scientific and technological advances in plant sciences were made possible by the global community of scientists who shared the same goal – to understand what makes a plant a plant from the molecular to the ecosystem levels.
As Arabidopsis united basic plant science researchers, it also brought together the funding agencies that supported plant science research. As researchers were organizing the Project, NSF was conducting discussions with its sister funding agencies in the U.S. and counterpart agencies in Europe. By the time the Project was launched at the 4th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research in Vienna in 1990, there was an agreement among NSF, NIH, DOE and USDA in the U.S., and an informal agreement among NSF, EC, BBSRC, and DFG to collaborate and coordinate support of an international Arabidopsis research project. These agencies also agreed to keep it simple and nimble by not establishing an official joint funding program and by not pooling any funds. They further agreed that all the funding agencies would share credit of the Project equally, not in proportion to their individual contributions. In essence, the funding agencies had a sense of joint ownership of the Project. There was also close communication between the funding agency representatives and the Arabidopsis research community, which contributed to the success of the Arabidopsis research project.
The 25th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR) will take place July 28 – August 1, 2014, in Vancouver, Canada. ICAR was a component of the original Project’s plan as a means to promote exchange of ideas and sharing of information. A majority of the 25th ICAR participants have likely entered the field after the Project started, and at least half of them do not know the time when there were no freely available research resources and tools. To me, that is the most precious outcome of the Project, namely new generations of plant scientists to whom international collaboration and sharing of ideas and research resources are an ingrained part of their research culture.
Today, the challenge Abelson spoke of in his editorial is being addressed by the world’s plant scientists through the Global Plant Council. Certainly, plant science research is still woefully underfunded in relation to the enormous contributions it can make to solving the world food and energy problems. However, I am very optimistic about the future because I have total confidence in the extraordinary ability of the plant science research community to put the higher goals ahead of individual needs and wants, and to complement their individual strengths through international collaboration and coordination.
Machi F. Dilworth
U.S. National Science Foundation (Retired)
Reference:
David W. Meinke, J. Michael Cherry, Caroline Dean, Steven D. Rounsley, and Maarten Koornneef. “Arabidopsis thaliana: A Model Plant for Genome Analysis” 1998: Science 282, 662-682
Elliot M. Meyerowitz. “Prehistory and History of Arabidopsis Research”. 2001: Plant Physiology 125, 15-19 ( http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/125/1/15.short)
Chris Somerville and Maarten Koornneef “A fortunate choice: the history of Arabidopsis as a model plant”. 2002: Nature Reviews Genetics 3, 883-889
Phillip H. Abelson. “A third Technological Revolution”, 1998: Science 279, 2019.
