|
|
|
Owen Hoekenga
Molecular Biologist
Phone: (607) 255-4502
Fax: (607) 255-1132
E-mail: Owen.Hoekenga@ars.usda.gov
|
Research Interests
The primary goal of my research is to understand the genetic and environmental
bases for crop quality, using tomato and corn as model systems. The emphasis
for the tomato project is to estimate the boundaries for consumer, regulator
and producer acceptable chemical diversity using a collection of heirloom
and modern breeding varieties. By estimating the boundaries of acceptable
variation, we can better assess the importance and significance of variation
seen in transgenic tomatoes that we have generated. This information should
allow consumers, regulators and other concerned parties to make better
decisions regarding biotechnology risk assessment and the safety of transgenic
crops. We have used mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance
(NMR) based approaches to determine the chemical composition of tomato
varieties.
The emphasis for the corn project is to improve the nutritional quality
of the important staple crop, with respect to iron bioavailability. Plant-based
foods do not provide iron in a form that is easily absorbed by people.
People who rely on monotonous diets dominated by a starchy staple food
crop are often iron deficient or anemic. Nearly half of the people on the
planet are iron deficient or anemic, thus understanding the genetic and
environmental bases for iron bioavailability can potentially improve the
quality of life for many people. We identified several quantitative trait
loci (QTL) in maize that affect iron nutritional quality, according to
bioassays performed with a human cell line, and isolated these QTL in new
varieties. Recently, collaborators performed feeding studies that used
our new, conventionally bred corn varieties and young broiler chickens
to further validate these QTL. The next phase will be to use the same MS
and NMR-based chemical profiling techniques we used for biotechnology risk
assessment in tomato to identify compounds that may be responsible for
the alterations in corn nutritional quality. The chemical profiling will
be used to help direct our molecular genetic and genomics-based research,
to identify the genes that underlie the nutritional quality QTL.
