Location: Cereal Disease Lab
Project Number: 5062-21220-025-024-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jul 1, 2023
End Date: Jun 30, 2025
Objective:
1) develop an efficient cereal transformation protocol for oat, wheat and barley; and 2) transform these cereal crops with genome editing constructs to further the development of disease resistant plants.
Approach:
Disease outbreaks can arise rapidly requiring an immediate and swift response to mitigate their impact. However, current research and transformation tools are slow. In this project we plan to develop the resources for rapid genome editing as well as transformation of other critical genes into cereals. Through this work we plan to generate several transgenic plants carrying highly effective Cas (Cas9, CasPhi and CasMini) methods. Initially cereal crops with favorable genetic phenotypes will undergo genetic analysis, and serve as the basic resource for downstream genome editing. Constructs of the favorable genes will be produced. These will be introduced into a new generation of plants utilizing highly effective Cas (Cas9, CasPhi and CasMini) methods. The phenotypic effects of the transformation of the new plants will be monitored, other genes of interest will be studied as they are discovered and the know how is established will allow production of additional generations transgenic plants for testing our hypothesis on gene function.
