Brent Buckner is currently a Co-PI on two National Science Foundation grants awarded within the Plant Genome Research Program. The first grant, entitled “High-density Genetic Map of Maize Transcripts”, is a collaborative effort between Dr. Buckner’s research group and the laboratories of Dr. Patrick Schnable (Senior Principal Investigator) and Dr. Dan Ashlock of Iowa State University. The award is for a total of $3,691,269 over a three year funding period. The Truman State University research effort will receive just over $143,000 of support for its three year commitment to this collaboration. The main research effort will be focused on the genetic mapping of thousands of sequenced maize genes and comparing this map to the completely sequenced rice genome. This high-density map will ultimately assist scientists in mapping and isolating maize genes that influence important traits such as yield and disease resistance. As part of this grant, Dr. Buckner’s undergraduate research group will investigate the degree of DNA sequence diversity that exists in the alleles of nine genes cloned and sequenced from a selection of important inbred lines of maize. The sequence diversity that exists in these inbred lines represents the potential for future improvement of these maize lines. In addition to funding these research activities, the award will also fund an international scientific cultural experience for the undergraduate researchers at Truman State University and Iowa State University. Dr. Buckner will lead a group of students on a tour of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) located outside of Mexico City. CIMMYT is one of the international centers responsible for the “Green Revolution”. While at CIMMYT the students will be exposed to the extraordinary genetic diversity of maize and wheat while learning about some of the challenges that face those who develop genetically improved plants for the developing world. En route to CIMMYT the undergraduate research students will stop in New Mexico and visit museums, extant Native American Pueblo communities and prehistoric Native American settlements, to consider the influences of maize on modern and traditional art and culture.
The second grant, on which Dr. Diane Janick-Buckner is also a CoPI, is entitled “Functional Analysis of Genes Involved in Meristem Organization and Leaf Initiation”, is a collaborative effort between the Truman researchers and the laboratories of Dr. Michael Scanlon (University of Georgia; Senior Principal Investigator), Dr. Patrick Schnable (Iowa State University) and Dr. Marja Timmermans (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories). The award is for a total of $3,939,129 over a four year funding period. The Truman State University research effort will receive just over $173,000 of support for its four year commitment to this collaboration. The main research effort will be focused on using Laser Capture Microscopy and Gene Microarray analyses to understand the gene interactions that take place during the differentiation of shoot apical meristem cells into leaf tissues. As part of this grant, Drs. Buckner’s and Janick-Buckner’s undergraduate research groups will clone and sequence portions of 12 maize homologs (genes similar by decent) known to be important to meristem activity in other plants. Using the sequence information from other plants the students will design degenerate polymerase chain reaction primers to amplify conserved regions of these genes in maize. These sequences will then be cloned, sequenced and included on the gene microarrays being produced for this project. In addition, once the microarray data is generated, Truman students will be involved in the bioinformatics analyses of these data. The student research effort will ultimately attempt to visualize the gene network involved in meristematic developmental decisions. In the summer of the fourth year of the award Truman students will intern at the collaborators laboratories while Drs. Buckner and Janick-Buckner will visit each of the collaborators laboratories.