Location: Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research
Project Number: 8062-21000-052-009-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2023
End Date: Sep 30, 2025
Objective:
The objective of this research is to determine the potential impact of maintaining more N in maize fields on crop yield, resilience, and sustainability in the US under current and future climates (AIMS1 & 2). This is complemented by a gene and allele discovery pipeline that aims at reducing N in kernels (AIM 3), remobilizing N back to the roots (AIM 4) and understanding the relationship of variation in stover composition with nitrogen loss (AIM 5). By the end of year, we should have a clear effective modeling of these nitrogen traits from plant to farm, candidate genes and pathways identified across four trait areas, potential implications for policy, and a set of priority traits and strategies that can be advanced in future public and private partnerships.
Approach:
The Cooperator will focus their research on AIM 3. The Cooperator will lead a comprehensive approach to reduce the N content of the grain by reducing protein from ~8% to ~4%. Their research includes numerous targeted approaches to reduce protein by examining the N transporters in the plant, N sink in the grain, and protein synthesis machinery and untargeted approaches to reducing grain N by screening and selecting on natural variation. The cooperator will coordinate selection experiments for low protein/nitrogen and transcriptomic profiling.
