TRANSCRIPT              

Edward S. Buckler 

ARS Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research Unit in Ithaca, New York

[Running time: 7 min. 26 sec]

Hi, I'm Ed Buckler. I'm a research geneticist in Ithaca, New York. 

I got started in ARS right out of my post-doc. I was working in North Carolina and at that time we were only able to look at a few genes at a time. It was starting our ability to understand and do the  statistical approaches that we needed to use for natural variation to both at the gene level and the whole plant level. 

Our groups' research is really focused at that junction of relating natural variation within the genome to natural variation of how a plant grows in the field and there is a lot when we try to relate those two it's a complex problem part of the problem there is 2 ½ billion base pairs in the maize genome and relating which nucleotide to which trait is a complex issue and what we've tried to strive toward and what many colleagues around the world is how do we make those connections? In the last decade we have really been able to make tremendous progress in 
relating nucleotides to variation in the field. 

When you first walk past a maize field it doesn't look very different but once you get out in that cornfield you realize that you are working with an organism with tremendous amounts of natural variation and what's been rewarding has been to take some of that natural variation such as Major Goodman had helped collect and understand again over the last 20 or 30 years and now we're able to use that natural variation and understand it at a much more detailed level. 

But maize also has a real special place in not only being so important for the entire world's agriculture but it's also one of the most diverse crops in the world and so for a geneticist it provides that opportunity to work on a species that's incredibly important for the world's food but also working with incredible amounts of diversity.

And a lot of the key reasons are because maize was domesticated from this wild relative about 10,000 years ago and but it did not pick up all of the natural variation from that wild relative. It only captured a portion of it. And over the last decade we've now learned there are about a thousand regions of the genome that have lost a great deal of genetic diversity. 

Som of that loss of genetic diversity was probably useful in order to make such a highly  productive type of plant that we have today but in other regions of the genome these may be areas were we want to go back to the natural variations still present in that wild relative and access it for making a better crop today.

Several hundred million people around the world are vitamin A deficient. We got into the question of what genes and what natural variation contributes to vitamin A production. This of course would also be very valuable for improving the quality of eggs and for livestock feed. But for human's it's critical and in the developing world, for example sub-Saharan Africa, and what we were able to do is look at the natural variation of all the genes that are involved in producing pro  vitamin A and we were able to specifically go in, identify the natural variation of two genes,  combine that natural variation together and through that process we have been able to increase the levels of pro vitamin A 16-fold in maize in between the time of initial discovery and now where it is already having an effect and people are starting to produce rice and maize that can be used and have those high levels of pro vitamin A. 

Plant genetics has already played an incredibility important role for our country. You know a century ago maize yield was only ⅛ of what it is today and it really is because of the science that went behind making more and more productive maize whether that was figuring out better agronomic approaches as farmers got better technology for doing it and also very important was figuring out better varieties of maize that could make more productive agriculture and we've essentially been able to transition across the world from being an agrarian society to one that can live in cities. It's because of the increased productivity in our agriculture and now mostly focused  in the Mid West that we now have a forest in the eastern part of the United States. So agriculture and plant genetics has already had a massive effect on our society but we now have coming on to this world another 2 billion people who need food and they also want a food that has more protein and more energy in their diet and the US is going to be a major contributor to feeding the entire world and so we need to continue making progress.

The most important thing the person on the street would find that's come out of this type of research is that ability to understand natural variation and be able to predict natural variation is now letting us breed better crops at a rate that is just, it may be three fold better than what we were able to do a decade ago.

So actually ARS has given me a great deal of freedom to explore some very important questions. But I think there are a couple of areas that we would still like to go to really explore. One is that we would really like to understand the importance of the variation that's in our germplasm banks. There's 20,000 different varieties of maize that are maintained in our germplasm banks. We've really only looked at a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand of them and we know there's  gems sitting in that germplasm bank and we'd like to work with them. 

We'd also like to take the basic approaches that we figured out in maize and apply it to hundreds of other crops so that we can understand the genes that are controlling natural variation and then accelerate breeding in those crops also. 

And finally I'd like to see an opportunity where ARS takes a lead in totally revolutionizing agriculture. Right now US agriculture is dominated by annual crops and these crops provide the farmer a lot of flexibility, which is wonderful, but they are not as productive as the most productive perennial crops so there's an opportunity for us to take some of our annuals, maize, wheat or rice and make them into perennial varieties that may be much more sustainable and much more productive.

This award coming to myself, it really is a reflection of a tremendous group of colleagues working together over the last decade.